Switching to Hyprland

Hyprland is a dynamic tiling Wayland (a replacement for the X11 window system protocol and architectur) compositor based on wlroots.

Introduction

I have used tiling window manager ever since i came to know about them (very recently really). I was using dwm which is based on xorg but since everybody was moving to hyprland i decided i should move to wayland too since it is modern and more efficient than xorg.

What is hyprland (again)

Hyprland is a dynamic tiling Wayland compositor based on wlroots. Although is an under development project, but it has already gained a lot of popularity and even though things break, it’s not a big deal. I can fix them with a little research (i have no life).

Hyprland supports a variety of layouts, including tiling, floating, and tabbed windows. It also has a number of features that are not found in other Wayland compositors, such as window animations, rounded corners, and Dual-Kawase Blur on transparent windows.

Why hyprland

DWM had everything i ever needed but hyprland is just better. In DWM, i had to do a lot of stuff on my own. Patches, configuring touchpad, window swallowing etc. Not to mention DWM doesn’t have a config file. I had to modify the source code and recompile the software. Hyprland has build in functionalities for so many things and the configuration file is so easy to understand.

How to install

Installation guide is on their wiki so i’ll be brief:

• Install these packages:

hyprland dunst pipewire wireplumber xdg-desktop-portal-hyprland polkit-kde-agent qt5-wayland qt6-wayland kitty

Note that the above package names are for arch linux and might be different for your distribution.

• Start hyprland from tty by typing Hyprland

You can add this line to your .shellprofile file for autostart:

exec Hyprland

• Your hyprland desktop should launch. Hyprland stores its config at $HOME/.config/hypr/hyprland.conf. Modify it to your liking

Protip: Launch kitty using MOD+Q

My rice?

How to rice like mine?

I gotchu. I have uploaded my dotfiles on github here. I also have written a shell script (inspired from: christitus.com) which will install the required packags and deploy my dotfiles.

How to (for noobies)

• Install arch linux. Add a user with sudo perms. Login as a user.

• Run these commands one by one:

sudo pacman -S git
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/saqibmir1/hyprland-dotfiles.git
cd hyprland-dotfiles
bash install-hyprland.sh

Some important point about the script

• Make sure you read the script before executing.
• The dependencies are listed in the script itself.
• The script will save log in install.log. If something goes wrong. You can always read the log file.
• The script requires root access in order to install packages.

Important packages used:

• Theme: Kripton
• Terminal: Foot
• Browser: Firefox
• Application Launcher: Rofi
• Status Bar: Waybar

Some basic keybindings: