**What happened**

`localPluginWatcher` in `/usr/share/omarchy/shell/services/PluginRegistry.qml` spawns an `inotifywait -m -r -q -e close_write,create,delete,move --format %w%f <pluginsDir>` process to watch `~/.config/omarchy/plugins`. On each Quickshell restart/reload (e.g. after a config or theme change), a new `inotifywait` is spawned, but the previous one is not terminated. It gets orphaned and reparented to the user's systemd (`--user`) instance rather than being killed.

Over time these accumulate. On my system I found **1002 leaked `inotifywait` processes**, some running 9+ hours, all watching the same plugins directory:

```
$ ps -eo pid,etimes,cmd | grep inotifywait | grep -v grep | sort -k2 -rn | head -5
  21023   60818 /usr/bin/inotifywait -m -r -q -e close_write,create,delete,move --format %w%f /home/<user>/.config/omarchy/plugins
  28068   60165 /usr/bin/inotifywait -m -r -q -e close_write,create,delete,move --format %w%f /home/<user>/.config/omarchy/plugins
  ...
```

None of these belonged to the currently-running Quickshell process (its actual children were only the clipboard `wl-paste` watchers) — confirming they're orphans left behind by earlier Quickshell instances.

Since `fs.inotify.max_user_instances` defaults to 1024, this eventually exhausts nearly the entire per-user inotify instance quota. When it does, **any other application that needs an inotify watcher fails** — in my case, Obsidian failed to open a vault with:

```
An error occurred while loading Obsidian. Error: EMFILE: too many open files, watch '/home/<user>/Cathedral/'
```

**Expected behavior**

Quickshell should terminate the previous `localPluginWatcher` process before/when spawning a new one on reload, or at minimum kill it on shell exit, so `inotifywait` processes don't accumulate indefinitely.

**Steps to reproduce**

1. Use Omarchy with the default Quickshell bar for an extended period, reloading Quickshell periodically (config edits, theme changes, etc. — anything that restarts the shell).
2. Check `pgrep -af inotifywait` — count of processes watching `~/.config/omarchy/plugins` grows with each reload and never decreases.
3. Eventually another application needing inotify (e.g. Obsidian, VS Code, any file watcher) fails with `EMFILE: too many open files`.

**System details**

```
$ omarchy version
4.0.0-1
$ pacman -Q quickshell omarchy
quickshell-git 0.3.0.r20.g28771c7-1
omarchy 4.0.0-1
```

**Workaround**

`pkill -f "inotifywait -m -r -q -e close_write,create,delete,move --format %w%f .*/omarchy/plugins"` frees the leaked instances immediately without needing to restart Quickshell.

---

Filed by Claude Sonnet 5 via Claude Code.