Hyprland

Hyprland is a wlroots-based tiling Wayland compositor written in C++. Noteworthy features of Hyprland include dynamic tiling, tabbed windows, a clean and readable C++ code-base, and a custom renderer that provides window animations, rounded corners, and Dual-Kawase Blur on transparent windows. General usage and configuration is thoroughly documented at Hyprland wiki.

Installation

Install one of the following:

hyprland - Latest upstream release.
hyprland-git^AUR - Latest commit to master branch.

Hyprland bundles its own version of wlroots, which closely follows wlroots-git^AUR. This improves stability, while also avoiding dependency conflicts with other wlroots-based compositors.

NVIDIA GPU users should also make sure to follow the NVIDIA specific page on the Hyprland wiki before trying to launch Hyprland. Failure to do so will likely result in many bugs including not being able to log in, flashing windows and high CPU usage.

Warning: Using an NVIDIA GPU with Hyprland is unsupported. Many users have had success but if something is broken then you are on your own.

Configuration

Configuration is done through a single config file, hyprland.conf, though it supports splitting the configuration into multiple files and including them in hyprland.conf. If you installed Hyprland with your package manager, it is likely in /usr/share/hyprland/hyprland.conf and, after logging in for the first time, ~/.config/hypr/hyprland.conf. If you installed from source, it is in the Hyprland cloned repository. Copy hyprland.conf to ~/.config/hypr/hyprland.conf.

hyprland.conf includes directives to configure your devices (monitors, keyboards, mice, trackpads), as well as settings for animations, decorations, layout, etc. You can set key bindings, window rules, and execute commands (once or each time the config is reloaded).

The config is automatically reloaded each time you update the file. You can also use hyprctl reload for the same effect. For some settings (particularly input settings), you may have to restart your Hyprland session.

Settings can also be changed on the fly with hyprctl but they will not be saved.

Configuration is documented in the Hyprland wiki.

Setting screen resolution

Hyprland will try to detect your screen resolution automatically however in some cases it will fail and default to a failsafe, usually if there are multiple screens present or if you have a hybrid laptop. If everything on your screen is huge then you need to define your default monitor and resolution in hyprland.conf.

First find your default monitor using hyprctl:

$ hyprctl monitors

Monitor eDP-1 (ID 0):
        1920x1080@144.003006 at 0x0
        description: Chimei Innolux Corporation 0x153C (eDP-1)
        make: Chimei Innolux Corporation
        model: 0x153C
        serial: 
        active workspace: 2 (2)
        special workspace: 0 ()
        reserved: 0 32 0 0
        scale: 1.00
        transform: 0
        focused: yes
        dpmsStatus: 1
        vrr: 0

Then add your monitor to hyprland.conf:

~/.config/hypr/hyprland.conf

...
monitor=eDP-1,1920x1080@144,0x0,1
...

Tip:

You should adjust eDP-1 and 1920x1080@144 to suit your own display.
0x0 is a position offset used for multi screen setups and the final 1 is the screen scaling factor.

Turning off the screen using DPMS after a timeout period

Hyprland has a built in dispatcher to handle DPMS requests however using it as a direct keybind is not recommended, doing so will result in you not being able to turn the screen back on and will require you to reboot.

Instead you should install swaylock and swayidle then call a script in your Hyprland configuration file, something like the following works:

$ [ ! -d "~/.config/hypr/scripts" ] && mkdir ~/.config/hypr/scripts

~/.config/hypr/scripts/sleep.sh

swayidle -w timeout 300 'swaylock -f -c 000000' \
            timeout 600 'hyprctl dispatch dpms off' \
            timeout 900 'systemctl suspend' \
            resume 'hyprctl dispatch dpms on' \
            before-sleep 'swaylock -f -c 000000' &

Tip: You can adjust the timeout periods by editing the numerical values, in seconds. 300 is 5 minutes, 600 is 10 minutes etc.

$ chmod +x ~/.config/hypr/scripts/sleep.sh

~/.config/hypr/hyprland.conf

...
exec-once = ~/.config/hypr/scripts/sleep.sh
...

Stop sleeping while using applications

The above setup will result in your monitor powering off while you are doing things like playing a game, watching a video or listening to music where you might not touch the system for longer than the timeout period.

To fix this you can either use Hyprlands built in Window Rules V2 function which has a idleinhibit rule or you can install one of either idlehack-git^AUR or sway-audio-idle-inhibit-git^AUR. The former uses D-Bus to prevent Swayidle requests whenever Firefox or Chromium are playing audio/video. The latter prevents Swayidle requests whenever any application is playing audio.

Usage

Starting

It is currently recommended to start Hyprland from a TTY.

$ Hyprland

While launching from a display manager is not officially supported, users have reported success launching from GDM, SDDM, and others. The hyprland package contains a display manager entry, and all Hyprland AUR packages will generate one automatically. If manually installing from source, an example Hyprland.desktop file is provided in the example directory of the source code, which may be copied to /usr/share/wayland-sessions/ to provide a display manager entry.

Both methods provide identical results, plus or minus a few environment variables and services.

Auto login

Users can automatically login by using a display manager or from the shell.

hyprctl and IPC

hyprctl is a command line utility that comes installed with Hyprland to communicate with the display server. It allows you to dispatch commands to the server (equivalent to commands in the configuration file, but with a slightly different syntax), set keywords, send queries and request information. See the full documentation.

Hyprland also exposes 2 UNIX Sockets, for controlling and getting information about Hyprland via code or command-line utilities. These sockets broadcast events on focus change (windows, workspaces, monitors), creation of windows/workspace, and so on.

Both hyprctl and the IPC sockets can be effectively used in scripts to control Hyprland for complex tasks.

Screen sharing

See Screensharing

As a wlroots-based compositor, Hyprland can utilize xdg-desktop-portal-wlr to enable screen capture in a range of applications by way of xdg-desktop-portal.

Hyprland also maintains xdg-desktop-portal-hyprland, a fork of the wlr portal with added functionality including region sharing (broken as of 2022-12-12), window sharing, and a graphical picker utility. Usage of the portal is further documented in the Hyprland wiki

Note: Both xdg-desktop-portal-wlr and xdg-desktop-portal-hyprland are known to conflict with other portal implementations under Hyprland. It is recommended to remove xdg-desktop-portal-kde, xdg-desktop-portal-gnome, or xdg-desktop-portal-lxqt, if installed.

Troubleshooting

Flickering on NVIDIA cards

This is a known issue on NVIDIA. You can use hyprland-nvidia^AUR or hyprland-nvidia-git^AUR instead for a better experience.

xdg-desktop-portal-hyprland is using a lot of CPU

This bug is caused when using an NVIDIA GPU without the nvidia_drm.modeset=1 kernel parameter.