Hyprland – An independent, dynamic tiling Wayland compositor | Hacker News Reader

Hyprland – An independent, dynamic tiling Wayland compositor

hypr.land

77 pointsAbuAssar78 comments

If, like me, you have been looking to move on from i3/sway into something with a “Paper”-like experience, check out niri: https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri

Paper (for GNOME shell) introduced a new tiling window manager paradigm: scrolling workspaces. New windows are placed to the right and build up in a stack. You push and pop from this stack as you enter and exit subtasks. For example, you might be editing code and want to open a PDF to find some datasheet values, then open a repl to do some calculations, then close both those windows and put the result into your code. The new windows grow out to the right, then you close them to scroll back left to the code.

While tools like papersway managed to hack a paper like experience on top of sway, niri implements it from the ground up into a window manager that is as light as sway but designed with scrolling workspaces as a first class citizen. For example, it has an overview mode for zooming out and seeing many workspaces at once. Given that the raison d’etre of the paper/scrolling paradigm is to be able to handle large numbers of windows, once you’ve used niri+overview it is very hard to go back to sway and live without it.

It is very nice! It’s also not really an improvement if you live in two windows all day long (80% if my time all I have open is a browser and my code) but as soon as you start having to context switch in and out of other tasks on multiple tracks (mortgage application, CAD design, proposal doc editing, email follow-ups, procrastinating on HN!) having paper like scrolling stacks is a huge boon.

> Paper (for GNOME shell) introduced a new tiling window manager paradigm: scrolling workspaces

I tried Paper for a couple of days and it didn't click, I found the amount of motion on the screen very distracting.

niri is neat, but it breaks my brain by working 90 degrees rotated from how I'd expect it to. Apparently I'm not the only one: https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/discussions/757

The day that overview feature dropped was one of the happiest days of my life.

There is also scroll (sway fork) and plugins for hyprland. Scrolling experience was not actually better in niri vs. others in my experience just because it was built around it. I tried to use niri, but there is too much missing functionality I want compared to hyprland and also worse power consumption.

Hell yeah, I love Niri. I'm excited to watch that project grow and develop.

I want to like Hyprland so bad, I'm using it right now. It has its problems, but it is fun to watch the animations and eye candy. I am concerned about the future of the project, seems like it has some scope creep and there is like a subscription model, or something? I don't know how well I understand that, doesn't sound like a good thing though. The website is an eyesore. People pretend it's totally bug-free, but it's just not. Even DistroTube has tried it.

The guy that writes it/maintains it is a piece of shit though. The last thing the Linux community needs is more bigotry and anime crap.

I believe the subscription model is solely for supporting the developers and in return you get some top tier grade dot files configurations to build your setup from.

I've attempted many times to adopt Hyprland, but I always come back to swaywm. Stability and speed always seem to be an issue. Both hyprland and the plugins (hyprpm, etc) have an alpha-level quality to them.

I have nothing but respect for vaxerski. He's 100% dedicated to the project and is incredibly prolific. But I feel like they need a better release strategy for those who prioritize stability over shiny new thing.

I only need to look at one file[1] (context[2], and it used to be worse[3]) to decide that I don't really want Hyprland, or anything else from that quick-and-dirty culture of software dev, on my system. Encouraging plugins to hook any function or method in a C++ program is insane. I'd be surprised if a Hyprland setup with multiple plugins could ever not be alpha-quality.

[1]: https://github.com/hyprwm/Hyprland/blob/e999ad664da9/src/plu... [2]: https://wiki.hypr.land/Plugins/Development/Advanced/ [3]: https://github.com/hyprwm/Hyprland/blob/a5a648091760/src/plu...

> hook any function

I hoped it wouldn't be what I thought it was... But my god, that [1] in your post. On second thought, it's pretty funny.

What makes me not want to use Hyprland is that the code has all kind of "YOLO" tells, the kind of ones that make you wonder if something is going to happen some say... for example:

- https://github.com/hyprwm/Hyprland/blob/00da4450db9bab1abfda...

I tried it, too buggy and it looks a bit unprofessional imo.

Still a hardpass for me since workspaces are bound to displays which makes absolutely no sense for me.

I swap workspaces very often with my tripple monitor xmonad setup.

movecurrentworkspacetomonitor will get you to whatever you want to do, just maybe not in a one liner keybind.

There's also focusworkspaceoncurrentmonitor, and anything more complicated can be scripted trivially to be on one keybind.

This is sad. XMonad handles workspaces with multiple monitors exactly the way I want. I really wish other window managers did -- especially on Wayland. Until they do, I'm stuck with XMonad. (Which is good, but it would be fun to get to try something else for once.)

I have been using https://github.com/tmfink/i3-wk-switch on i3 for years and I just noticed the README also lists sway - maybe it helps.

Workspaces are not bound to displays in hyprland. This is one major reason I'm using hyprland over niri, where it's not really possible to work around that issue.

Am I wrong?

Every monitor has its own set of workspaces. Workspace 4 on display A is not the same as Workspace 4 on display B is not the same as Workspace 4 on display C.

Functionally you can focus any workspace on any monitor, and ids do not change when doing that. You can set things up both ways, but it's actually easier to just have a key focus workspace x on the current monitor than to lock workspaces to specific monitor.

I like eye candy but browsing the hall of fame makes me realize that some people can't possibly be using their systems for anything other than showing off.

The two top ones, sure, but the rest of them look reasonably usable.

Further down the list, the biggest offender for me was 'Golden Era' there is no way you're using that to do actual coding (shown in the video).

Those demonstrations are absolutely amazing and I don't think they are meant to maximize usability.

Gaps between windows in tiling managers (why would you have random parts of your background take up screen estate), and "icons instead of numbers" for workspace identifiers (was the circle icon meta-5? 6? 7?) are the biggest indicators for this. I would get annoyed in 20 minutes.

I always had a keybind to toggle gaps. sometimes certain layouts just feel congested, and the gaps put spaces between the windows and helps them feel like they are in their own space (even though it makes them even smaller). It's purely psychological and often doesnt make sense, but it's not just "show off the wallpaper and waste real estate", it's for mental processing.

And same goes for the icons. I've personally never gotten there. but also, I don't look at the icons. They could be hidden. I know if I need to get to slack or email, it's on workspace one. So if the workspace badge says "1" or "1: Comms" or "" ... it doesn't really matter, because the keybind is muscle memory anyway. But on the flip side, because all of that is muscle memory... I might go "Where was my email at again? Workspace 1, or 2?" and having an envelope as the label makes it easier to find.

Different people have different workflows. And yes, some people are doing those things to sacrifice usability in the name of aesthetics, but some people may be GAINING usability by doing these things. People are vast and diverse.

I use gaps in sway. My windows have margins anyway because I use a border to indicate the active window and the border uses that margin. Fortunately sway has a built-in setting be space saving eg. in single window cases (where I know the window had focus always).

I set this up many years ago and never changed it.

It's a phase. I used to try and customize everything, tiling window managers, custom color schemes, Arch, etc. Right now I'm on a Mac so vanilla I didn't even change the wallpaper.

Was about to mention this. 25y+ linux user here, we all had our ricing phase, where we'd customize our desktop and shell to oblivion. Now, I'm always on a as-vanilla-as-possible Ubuntu machine, or a Macbook with the same default wallpaper that came when I bought it.

The only thing I do to my new systems is installing oh-my-zsh, because that gives me a lot of goodies for basically zero configuration (I just use and learned the default presets to be "my own")

Since we're now bragging about how vanilla our systems are, the only things I install are wezterm, nushell, helix, nix. I've moved everything else into git repo's so they're no longer system configs, but project configs.

Last week I took a repo full of notes about the sizes of building materials and made inkscape and gimp "dependencies" of that project.

Next time I install Linux I think I'm going to make the filesystem immutable so that I not only don't configure it, but can't.

I think the next move is to not install Linux at all, completely impossible to mutate as it's not even existent? lol

i'm using the default macos wallpaper as well. i almost never see the desktop, anyways... on my sway desktop, i don't have gaps or anything -- doesn't matter to me, i'm too busy doing something.

Or if you customize for ergonomics, the phase can last you a lifetime

I guess I am still in that phase then, after 25y+ of Linux. Not that I rice constantly but that I configure my desktop exactly how I like it and then let it stay. Usually the ricing/configuring comes when I buy new hardware.. so not that often. Or when a major change like Wayland comes around which is what made switch from Arch/X11/Bspwm to Arch/Wayland/Hyperland. I have tried but can not use vanilla for long... I just have to adapt the system to me. I feel constrained if I have to adapt to the system.

The only major non-vanilla thing I had was Rectangle, couldn't live without it.

Now I've replaced it with a Hammerspoon script with some additions like setting my window layout based on where I am.

It's so much easier when you don't need to customise everything to the nines.

(I SO MUCH want to like and use Nix, but every time I've tried I've failed :D)

You'd be surprised. The color themes look super complicated, but writing the CSS for one of these desktops is like a weekend project (at the longest).

I guess you sabotaged your own point with the answer. If it takes a full weekend to just have my DE look like what I feel is needed, that's a lot of time wasted that you could be doing useful work or even gaming, in that sense, idk. But to each their own.

I was a ricer before in my heydays of Linux, but now, after 25 years, I just use whatever comes by default with Xubuntu (XFCE) and a Macbook

It's not much time at all, nor is it wasted if you actually intend to stay on Linux.

My NixOS config was a much larger investment - that took a few weeks to debug. But I've used it for more than 4 years now, and it's been more stable than any other OS I've used. If you're not building it for satisfaction or /r/unixporn then you can afford to accommodate your creature comforts.

Those are just rice contests. I'd imagine the majority of them took it as a challenge to win the contest rather than use it as their daily driver.

I don't care much for the eye candy either, but I do appreciate how gradient borders look:

https://cdn.imgchest.com/files/y2pckdepoa7.png

That's the only eye candy I would wish for in Sway or SwayFx.

There’s a 500 line script called “xborders” that will draw eye-candy borders on i3. By default I think it does solid colors, but it is 500 lines of Python, I bet you could customize it to draw whatever gradients you want. Needs a compositor, of course.

Well, those are literally entries for a contest so you'd be correct, they are meant to be for showing off.

I really like Cinnamon. Basic, basic tiling window management that covers most cases, but DE is fleshed out enough that it's actually capable of running an external monitor with my laptop's lid closed, and can even recover from the shock of opening the lid back up and unplugging the HDMI cable. This is my 20th year of desktop Linux and all I can say is that Fedora and Cinnamon works amazingly well.

Daily driving on a Fedora Atomic system and really liking it. Configuration much cleaner (to me) compared to Sway that I used to run. I also appreciate the plugin system.

One footgun is podman stop kills the display manager unless you launch terminal in its own subprocess.

If you want to try this but not really spend time configuring it, there's a cool OS distro called Omarchy. https://omarchy.org/

I recently finished setting up arch + Hyprland manually last weekend, and then saw Omarchy for the first time yesterday and it basically does everything I wanted + more QOL features. Hit me just slightly too late. But great work from DHH.

Its also very easy on nixos. I could switch from xmonad/xorg to hyprland in a minute (and back).

Do you still prefer XMonad?

I use it over 10 years now. Its perfect except of the haskell/ghc payload that made it complicated on older machines. To compile GHC on my 2019 dell xps notebook took like 8 hours.

But its not a problem anymore, since I switched to nixos. But xorg will be eventually obsolete and there seems no actual replacement yet.

> xorg will be eventually obsolete and there seems no actual replacement yet.

That's also my worry. Plus, Waymonad never took off.

Seconding Omarchy.

Not only I'm progressively migrating from my Mac onto an Omarchy linux setup... but I've even gone and beaten my Mac into behaving more like Omarchy (with Aerospace as the tiling wm) in the meantime...

TIL 37signals officially (?) develops a distro

Two distros, actually: https://omakub.org/

Omakub was an experiment and is essentially finished.

For most electron apps, you should put the above in ~/.config/electron-flags.conf. Note that VSCode is known not to work with it.

Seems like a deal breaker.

Code works just fine with Hyprland in my experience, you just need yo tweak the interface scaling. However, I've taken the opportunity to learn neovim since switching to arch/Hyprland, since the emphasis is much more on keyboard-centric input. Can't say I miss vscode much, other than multi cursor.

Multi cursors is in the way for 0.12 I think

They clearly managed to make the window manager, so evidently it was not.

It's pretty common to need to hack stuff for tiling window managers. Java/Swing has required faking being LG3D since forever for example to run some compatibility code paths. Yeah, Looking Glass.

For the benefit of others, that note comes from this page:

https://wiki.hypr.land/Getting-Started/Master-Tutorial/#forc...

It has been common for years to use such flags for Electron-based apps on Wayland. It's not specific to Hyprland, and it's not as bad as it sounds. Chromium has been working on Wayland support for years and it was behind a feature flag. It's worked well for a while now and will be the default soon. https://www.phoronix.com/news/Chrome-Auto-Ozone-Platform

I suggest Cosmic Desktop (currently at alpha7) for anyone looking for a hyprland -kind of experience but with a bit more desktop feeling.

It's already quite stable even though it's an alpha version, possibly thanks to being implemented in Rust. I've been using it daily on my personal laptop since its release in April. No big problems, some missing features and tweakability though.

I second this. Cosmic has been rock solid for me even in Alpha.

It looks great and has some really nice built-in apps (like cosmic term that is built off of Alacritty)

I've been using Hyprland for a while now. I really like it. I've tried tiling window managers before and bounced off, but hypr really gets along with me.

Though I have the eye candy stuff cranked way down, doesn't really add too much for me.

Hyprland is on my todo list because I think it will the reason why I move to Linux. The level of customization and performance is amazing. You can build the desktop you want.

I’ve been using it for a year and can’t say it does anything I couldn’t do with dwm, xmonad, i3wm over my past 18 years of tiling WM experience.

IMO it's a matter of effort involved. You can get the cool animations in most WMs but for the majority, it's certainly not out of the box.

i just want a proper static tiling manager (with predefined nodes that correspond to roles, so new windows go into that slot. eg. my references are always on the right window, my code is always on the left. and I don’t ever need more than three windows on screen). being the window manager is clunky for me.

This sounds similar to how I use XMonad (except I swap in different workspaces on the main monitor as I work). I wish there was something like it for Wayland...

Wanted to try this, but I have Nvidia and Ubuntu, and the page says:

> NVIDIA GPUs are often not usable out-of-the-box, follow the Nvidia page after installing Hyprland if you plan to use one. Blame NVIDIA for this.

> Debian and Ubuntu’s Hyprland is extremely outdated. I do not recommend using the packaged versions at all. Build the entire stack manually instead.

Any good alternative that works on my setup?

sway works fine with nvidia, even though it's not supposed to

Hyprland works with nvidia just fine with minimal coniguration, just as well as any other wayland compositor I've tried, and I have a very old card. Having out of date packages is going to be an issue on Ubuntu for software in general, but probably sway would be better to try.

I’m a Mac user but I spotted this in one of my employees’ computer and it looks sick.

Am also using it with minimal eye candy stuff.

It's pretty solid but I dislike that I had to install many additional things for everything to work smoothly. I think some "more sensible defaults" really wouldn't hurt.

I mean just go to https://wiki.hypr.land/ and take a look at the "Hypr Ecosystem" navigation entry. Really? I need to install and learn about ~15 additional hypr* binaries to use this as intended?

Omarchy gives you sensible defaults to save all that time.

https://omarchy.org/

Reinstalling Linux just to configure a piece of software is extremely overkill.

It does look to be something that runs on top of a fresh arch install. However it definitely isn't what I'm looking for. I'd rather there would be another arch package that installs most of the packages needed for the recommended Hyprland setup. The same way it works for e.g. gnome.

Yet another Tiling WM Clone, granted probably a very good one.

But, until there is a Fluxbox clone on Wayland that can use ~/.fluxbox without any configuration changes, I will stick to X11.

As a second choice I would accept a cwm clone that can use the same config file as cwm(1).

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