Hyprland#

At this point pretty much everyone in the Linux community knows about Hyprland, but in case you don’t (or if you’re not really sure you do): It’s a piece of software that makes your computer look good and be more productive. In a more technical language, it’s a Wayland compositor, which is kinda like a Xorg server but for Wayland.

Instalation#

Installing and configuring Hyprland is DIY, much like Arch Linux itself, you have to tinker with it until you get a desired result. I’m no stranger to this DIY approach since I run Arch Linux myself, but I have to admit Hyprland was a bit more complicated than I anticipated.

In true DIY fashion, you need to have a wiki tab opened at all times. Most of the time you’ll have over 10 wiki tabs opened trying to get something to work.

Now for the actual installation you just type a simple sudo pacman -S hyprland and you’re good to go.

Configuration#

To me this is the most difficult part and the steepest learning curve. Hyprland is highly customizable which means that you’ll be able to get your environment perfect for your needs. But if you are starting out, usually you don’t know what you need, because you’re still learning the basics. It’s a bit like a chicken or the egg problem, I need to know how to use it in order to configure to my liking, but I also need to configure it before using.

To break free of this loop I went searching for some templates or presets that I can use. Generally these presets are already more than enough for my needs and I can fine tune them later. And the one I found was JaKoolLit’s Dot Files which had a custom installer, already shipped with wallpapers, custom shortcuts, cheat sheets and a few cool applications.

On one hand it’s pretty cool to have the installer, on the other hand by using it I don’t really learn much about where the dot files go or which config does what. At the start it makes my life really easy, but then it becomes a bit hard when I need to fine tune it

This is a parallel to Vibe Coding, nowadays we have a ton of people generating millions of LoC which do more or less what they intended, but as soon as they need to customize it, no one knows how

All in all though, I was pretty happy with how easy it was to get started fast, now about using Hyprland

Usage Experience#

Perhaps the biggest Hyprland feature (besides eye candy and ricing potential) is the window tiling. Open up apps and you’ll soon be staring at the Fibonacci sequence in Wayland form. But, how exactly do we open an App?

Quick google search shows me that Super+Q opens the terminal, but the cheat sheet tells me it’s Super+Enter. And now it’s a good time to make a tangent and talk about opinionated choices

Opinions#

Often you’ll see something on Linux which is very opinionated and to be fair I usually just shrug it off, because it is what it is. I tend to accept how things are and I don’t customize it very much.

The last of these opinionated softwares I saw was Omarchy. And much like before I completely ignored the opinionated nature of it, but now after trying raw Hyprland I understand it better.

Hyprland is such a customizable software that you can change it to be exactly what you want, but the opposite is also true: you get someone dot files and you tend to adapt to their style. That’s it, show me your dot files and I’ll tell you what your opinions are

First steps#

By using the cheatsheet I was able to get started pretty quickly, pop windows into existance, move them around a bit inside the workspace, close them and call it a day. Then the hurdles started showing up

Multi-workspace yes, multi monitor?#

Turns out the config file I got already had some support for multiple monitors, but it felt very inconsistent. For one, apps would always open where my cursor was, and since I’m using a DE which prioritize keyboard shortcuts, the cursor was often on my main monitor.

Waybar was also struggling to consistently show which workspace was bound to each screen, sometimes showing the same workspace on different screens.

These problems were show stoppers and at the end of that sessions I was feeling a bit disappointed, until the next day when I dove into the config files.

As it turns out, I was able to make my cursor track the current workspace, automatically warping to whichever workspace I changed to, this fixed the problems with windows opening on different screens. Then by using nwg-displays I could bind each workspace to a specific monitor, and finally I manually added each workspace into waybar config (instead of the default persistent config) and it fixed that for me.

Constant Jittering#

A few minutes after booting the computer, I’d notice the tiles jittering every 2 seconds. Funnily enough, this would only start happening after I edited any config file, and after a few more debugging, I noticed it started happening right after I copied anything into the clipboard. Turns out the clipboard manager I was using had a weird quirk where it’d open a 1x1 window and very briefly close it. This has something to do with wayland and clipboard and I’m not entirely sure the relation, but after I stopped using that clipboard manager windows were very consistent.

Quick interjection. I use JetBrains IDEs, and lately I have seen this annoying behavior where everytime I hovered over anything It’d start flickering the tooltip and glitching my waybar with the amount of open windows. 1 google search later and I found a github issue related to this where some people added a new windowrule which made it stop happening. One thing I really like about Linux is the community, it’s generally quite easy to figure out this issues when so many people are having them constantly

Plasma Broke#

The nice thing about graphic sessions is that I can swap between them. If I’m not felling Hyprland today I can switch to Plasma and keep using it normaly. Except all my theming and customization on plasma broke. I have little to no knowledge when it comes to the insides of app themes, all I know are some words like Gtk and Qt.

I tried solving this by setting some settings related to themes but it didn’t work. That is until a few months later when an update broke KDE themes on Hyprland too, then I pressed some magic buttons on each app to set it’s theme and suddenly my plasma session was fixed again.

CS2#

I’m not entirely sure this is Hyprland’s fault, but some matches I wouldn’t be able to move the camera, and in other matches my character model would flicker. The latter I could fix by setting the game to borderless fullscreen and then toggling fullscreen on hyprland. The former I could only fix by rebooting the game. It happened few and far between but still not a pleasant experience having to reboot mid ranked match

After a few weeks#

I got really used to the keybinds and the experience Hyprland provides. The biggest jump In productivity I had was specifically the lack of floating windows. Since every program opened is on the screen at the same time fighting for real estate, it trained my brain to use less programs at the same time and divide them better in workspaces, which in turn helped my focus better. My browser is always on workspace 2. WebStorm is always on 4, Golang on 5 and DataGrip on 6. Discord on workspace 1, Steam on 3 and I still have 7,8,9 and 10 free to put a background movie or youtube video.

The moment I knew I had working great, was one day I booted into Windows to play League of Legends and I tried to use Hyprland shortcuts.

2 months and a half later#

It’s mid February now and I’ve been using Hyrpland daily as my window manager. I don’t have metrics for productivity levels, but it feels like I’m better. I’ve kept plasma as a backup strategy and never had to use it. For desktop computers, specially in multi monitors setup I think hyprland is usefull but I see the appeal of a floating window manager more clearly. For laptops I don’t think I’d go with anything else. That being said my current laptop is a MacBook Pro, and I use the default window manager.

All in All Hyprland has been a great choice and easier than anticipated switch. Although I considered giving up on the first few days I’m glad I persisted. If you are thinking about ricing potential or productivity gains, consider trying it out.