11 ms·

Hyprland: A dynamic tiling Wayland compositor

144 points by falkaer 4y ago

3836293648 4y ago
I want to switch, but it's still super glitchy on NVIDIA and waaay too slow on my laptop.
- fordsmith 4y ago
  had that issue as well but I found that enabling a couple optimizations fixed them all on my laptop. I created an aur package for it hyprland-opti-git
yigitkonur35 4y ago
I'd love to take advantage of this incredible tool in MacOS. Managing windows on MacOS is quite a challenge.
- idle_zealot 4y ago
  I sorely miss tiling WMs when I use MacOS; Amethyst and yabai just seem to big out all the time, lose track of windows, get confused by native tabs, and deal poorly with windows that force maximum/minimum sizes. I've concluded that MacOS's window model just really doesn't mesh with tiling. My current solution, after much experimentation with tools like Rectangle, Hookshot, and Spectacle, is to use Swish[1]. It feels sort of like an inside-out version of how I use Sway on linux. With Sway each window that I open is tiled onto the current desktop, then I re-balance the split or reposition the window with my mouse, and set the window to float if it doesn't cooperate. With Swish each window opens as floating, but by swiping on its title bar I can tile it into whatever position I want. This defaulting to floating works better on MacOS where the frequency of uncooperative windows is much higher than on linux. The killer feature of Swish for me is that it keeps track of the grid you make by swiping windows into place and maintains it even when you resize or reposition windows relative to one another, much like i3/sway. It's still quite frustrating though that I have to pay $16 for an app to make window management bearable. This is a basic OS feature that I've come to take for granted. 1: https://highlyopinionated.co/swish/ https://highlyopinionated.co/swish/
  - extr 4y ago
    I've been using MacOS for awhile and this is likewise my one true gripe. I've played around with amethyst and yabai and also find them just a little too shaky to rely on. I miss the rock solid nature of i3/bspwm. And trying to script my own functionality with Hammerspoon or BTT has been an exercise in frustration. I'll give Swish a shot with this recommendation. However I'm not sure Swish solves the big benefit of i3/bspwm for me, which is the lightning-quick virtual desktop and "send to desktop" functionality of a tiling WM on linux. Having two apps open side by side is useful, but not quite as useful as having two apps open full screen on virtual desktops 1 and 2, and the switch between them being totally instantaneous.
    - idle_zealot 4y ago
      > lightning-quick virtual desktop I recall that yabai can achieve this with SIP disabled. It somehow injects code to disable the Space switching animation, so hotkeys to switch Spaces become instant.
  - extr 4y ago
    Actually, if you're interested at all, I just, after literally months of reading about this, found a pretty sick solution. Have you ever heard of Phoenix? https://github.com/kasper/phoenix/ https://github.com/kasper/phoenix/. Despite googling around for this exact topic, with 3.8k stars I had never heard of it. Apparently someone has created slim, JS scriptable interface that is basically tailor made toward creating your own tiling WM. I just installed it and loaded one of the examples: https://github.com/nik3daz/spin2win https://github.com/nik3daz/spin2win. And what it does is basically ignores the built-in spaces and creates truly virtual desktops by just hiding and resizing windows. And it works pretty well. The response time between switching "desktops" is basically instant.
    - idle_zealot 4y ago
      I had not heard of Phoenix, and it looks interesting. Though I doubt I would be able to do a better job of reimplementing sway/i3 in Javascript than the folks working on yabai have managed.
- drmidnight 4y ago
  Check out https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst I’ve been using it for years and it makes MacOS window management a dream.
- creese 4y ago
  Try yabai.
eterps 4y ago
Any advantages over Sway, other than look and feel?
- crawl_soever 4y ago
  It uses dynamic tiling rather than static tiling meaning more versatility how specific desktops get arranged such as bsp, tree, or even custom arrangements
  - Izkata 4y ago
    I thought Sway was based on i3, which is an arbitrary-width tree that can have different display modes per container node in the tree. Hyperland's wiki only lists "Dwindle" and "Master" layouts, which from the description are strictly less versatile than i3 (and Sway?) in exchange for convenience if those layouts are what you want. Does it even have something as flexible as i3? (and Sway?)
    - falkaer 4y ago
      I use the dwindle layout which is similar to bspwm in automatic splitting mode. One advantage is you can drag and drop windows into other nodes, which will be split appropriately, it's surprisingly neat when you have a lot of stuff open. It's easiest to get a feel for the differences by just trying it out or watching some videos of it on r/unixporn
- ccakes 4y ago
  I'm just giving this a try and with xdg-desktop-portal-hyprland (their fork of the wlr portal) I get perfect screensharing in Google Meet using pure Wayland. That alone is interesting enough to get me to look at switching..
  - jpeeler 4y ago
    Perfect screensharing meaning you can select individual windows to share as well as the entire screen(s)?
Y_Y 4y ago
I've never liked animations in interfaces like this. It was fun to play with when Compiz was new, but it doesn't make the tool any more useful or pleasant for me to use. At least it's not as bad as the OSX "magic lamp" minimize.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- sheepdestroyer 4y ago
  I want my systems functional, efficient, snappy. One of the first things I do on a new device is to disable animations and similar "eye candy". On Gnome it's hidden, but can be changed with gnome-tweek-tools ; on Android it's hidden too, in the developer options that you have to unlock (7 taps on build number). In both cases, those animations easily lose frames and are distracting, without talking about the frivolous power spending on portable devices, but they are enabled by default and not easily removed. It bugs me to jo end that wrong priorities seem to apparently be the norm.
  - Krssst 4y ago
    Note: when disabling animations on GNOME, a noticeable delay seems to remain before the alt-tab switcher appears. I don't remember which extension I use to work around that; maybe this one: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1317/alt-tab-switcher-popup-delay-removal/ https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1317/alt-tab-switcher...
  - d_tr 4y ago
    I like gsettings. You can just put the calls in a script once and call it whenever needed. You can access everything from there. You can search for relevant keys from the terminal or with dconf editor.
  - kaba0 4y ago
    If implemented well it shouldn’t cost too much energy, it is basically interpolating a value and redrawing it a few times with the GPU.
- 4y ago
dTal 4y ago
The problem with "alternative" Wayland compositors is that so much more functionality is pushed into the compositor under the Wayland architecture compared to window managers on X11. So it's a ton more work to write a Wayland compositor than an X11 window manager, and most of it is tedious boilerplate that almost certainly has nothing to do with your motivation for writing a new compositor in the first place. This in turn affords many more opportunities to introduce bugs, missing functionality etc. I trust "weird" compositors much less than I trust "weird" X11 window managers - it's more like using an alternative Xorg than an alternative WM. "...there is still a lot of boilerplate involved in writing a compositor, much more than for an X11 window manager, namely setting up your own rendering code, registering and storing input devices and screens in your own data structures, passing input events to windows, calculating bounds for bars and other overlays (courtesy of layer-shell) and others. X11 handles all of this for you..." https://tudorr.ro/blog/technical/2021/01/26/the-wayland-experience/ https://tudorr.ro/blog/technical/2021/01/26/the-wayland-expe... <edit> Several people mentioning wlroots. I can't say I've ever attempted it myself, but if you take a look at the blog post above, the author is very clear on the fact that even with the benefit of wlroots (which they highly praise) writing a Wayland compositor is still a lot more work than writing an X11 window manager (which they have also done, so they are something of an authority). wlroots doesn't abstract everything away, it just gives you a bunch of useful tools. "With Wayland, you handle everything, even with wlroots."
- 3836293648 4y ago
  Yeah, but wlroots is taking the role of Xorg there, leaving WM writers to mostly just write the WM
  - Izkata 4y ago
    I'm just wondering how long it'll be until someone uses wlroots to write a client/server architecture like Xorg...
    - TingPing 4y ago
      It will never be a popular way to use Wayland because its just a worse design.
netr0ute 4y ago
How does Hyprland compare to the Pop!_OS tiling system?
E39M5S62 4y ago
It's a shame that they refuse to use a versioned release of wlroots. It makes packaging this needlessly difficult (or impossible, depending on distribution policy).
- codetrotter 4y ago
  https://wiki.hyprland.org/Getting-Started/Installation/ https://wiki.hyprland.org/Getting-Started/Installation/ has some relevant info relating to this > Arch, NixOS and openSUSE Tumbleweed are very supported. For any other distro (not based on Arch/Nix) you might have varying amounts of success. However, since Hyprland is extremely bleeding-edge, distros like Pop!_OS, Ubuntu, etc. might have major issues running Hyprland. and > This project is under development and is constantly changing. It’s not practical to expect that they will support every distro from the get-go, when they are actively developing it.
friend_and_foe 4y ago
Using sway currently, I intend to check it out. Just so that I know beforehand, can transparency, gaps, animation be turned off?
- shaunsingh 4y ago
  Yes. All effects are entirely optional
guerrilla 4y ago
This looks beautiful and it's in AUR, so I'm definitely going to try this tomorrow. I've been shopping for a replacement for GNOME because they keep removing features I'm in the middle of my using which is really stressful and I just can't trust them anymore.

144 points by falkaer 4y ago

3836293648 4y ago

I want to switch, but it's still super glitchy on NVIDIA and waaay too slow on my laptop.

fordsmith 4y ago
had that issue as well but I found that enabling a couple optimizations fixed them all on my laptop. I created an aur package for it hyprland-opti-git

yigitkonur35 4y ago

I'd love to take advantage of this incredible tool in MacOS. Managing windows on MacOS is quite a challenge.

idle_zealot 4y ago
I sorely miss tiling WMs when I use MacOS; Amethyst and yabai just seem to big out all the time, lose track of windows, get confused by native tabs, and deal poorly with windows that force maximum/minimum sizes. I've concluded that MacOS's window model just really doesn't mesh with tiling. My current solution, after much experimentation with tools like Rectangle, Hookshot, and Spectacle, is to use Swish[1]. It feels sort of like an inside-out version of how I use Sway on linux. With Sway each window that I open is tiled onto the current desktop, then I re-balance the split or reposition the window with my mouse, and set the window to float if it doesn't cooperate. With Swish each window opens as floating, but by swiping on its title bar I can tile it into whatever position I want. This defaulting to floating works better on MacOS where the frequency of uncooperative windows is much higher than on linux. The killer feature of Swish for me is that it keeps track of the grid you make by swiping windows into place and maintains it even when you resize or reposition windows relative to one another, much like i3/sway. It's still quite frustrating though that I have to pay $16 for an app to make window management bearable. This is a basic OS feature that I've come to take for granted. 1: https://highlyopinionated.co/swish/ https://highlyopinionated.co/swish/
- extr 4y ago
  I've been using MacOS for awhile and this is likewise my one true gripe. I've played around with amethyst and yabai and also find them just a little too shaky to rely on. I miss the rock solid nature of i3/bspwm. And trying to script my own functionality with Hammerspoon or BTT has been an exercise in frustration. I'll give Swish a shot with this recommendation. However I'm not sure Swish solves the big benefit of i3/bspwm for me, which is the lightning-quick virtual desktop and "send to desktop" functionality of a tiling WM on linux. Having two apps open side by side is useful, but not quite as useful as having two apps open full screen on virtual desktops 1 and 2, and the switch between them being totally instantaneous.
  - idle_zealot 4y ago
    > lightning-quick virtual desktop I recall that yabai can achieve this with SIP disabled. It somehow injects code to disable the Space switching animation, so hotkeys to switch Spaces become instant.
- extr 4y ago
  Actually, if you're interested at all, I just, after literally months of reading about this, found a pretty sick solution. Have you ever heard of Phoenix? https://github.com/kasper/phoenix/ https://github.com/kasper/phoenix/. Despite googling around for this exact topic, with 3.8k stars I had never heard of it. Apparently someone has created slim, JS scriptable interface that is basically tailor made toward creating your own tiling WM. I just installed it and loaded one of the examples: https://github.com/nik3daz/spin2win https://github.com/nik3daz/spin2win. And what it does is basically ignores the built-in spaces and creates truly virtual desktops by just hiding and resizing windows. And it works pretty well. The response time between switching "desktops" is basically instant.
  - idle_zealot 4y ago
    I had not heard of Phoenix, and it looks interesting. Though I doubt I would be able to do a better job of reimplementing sway/i3 in Javascript than the folks working on yabai have managed.
drmidnight 4y ago
Check out https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst I’ve been using it for years and it makes MacOS window management a dream.
creese 4y ago
Try yabai.

eterps 4y ago

Any advantages over Sway, other than look and feel?

crawl_soever 4y ago
It uses dynamic tiling rather than static tiling meaning more versatility how specific desktops get arranged such as bsp, tree, or even custom arrangements
- Izkata 4y ago
  I thought Sway was based on i3, which is an arbitrary-width tree that can have different display modes per container node in the tree. Hyperland's wiki only lists "Dwindle" and "Master" layouts, which from the description are strictly less versatile than i3 (and Sway?) in exchange for convenience if those layouts are what you want. Does it even have something as flexible as i3? (and Sway?)
  - falkaer 4y ago
    I use the dwindle layout which is similar to bspwm in automatic splitting mode. One advantage is you can drag and drop windows into other nodes, which will be split appropriately, it's surprisingly neat when you have a lot of stuff open. It's easiest to get a feel for the differences by just trying it out or watching some videos of it on r/unixporn
ccakes 4y ago
I'm just giving this a try and with xdg-desktop-portal-hyprland (their fork of the wlr portal) I get perfect screensharing in Google Meet using pure Wayland. That alone is interesting enough to get me to look at switching..
- jpeeler 4y ago
  Perfect screensharing meaning you can select individual windows to share as well as the entire screen(s)?

Y_Y 4y ago

I've never liked animations in interfaces like this. It was fun to play with when Compiz was new, but it doesn't make the tool any more useful or pleasant for me to use. At least it's not as bad as the OSX "magic lamp" minimize.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
sheepdestroyer 4y ago
I want my systems functional, efficient, snappy. One of the first things I do on a new device is to disable animations and similar "eye candy". On Gnome it's hidden, but can be changed with gnome-tweek-tools ; on Android it's hidden too, in the developer options that you have to unlock (7 taps on build number). In both cases, those animations easily lose frames and are distracting, without talking about the frivolous power spending on portable devices, but they are enabled by default and not easily removed. It bugs me to jo end that wrong priorities seem to apparently be the norm.
- Krssst 4y ago
  Note: when disabling animations on GNOME, a noticeable delay seems to remain before the alt-tab switcher appears. I don't remember which extension I use to work around that; maybe this one: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1317/alt-tab-switcher-popup-delay-removal/ https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1317/alt-tab-switcher...
- d_tr 4y ago
  I like gsettings. You can just put the calls in a script once and call it whenever needed. You can access everything from there. You can search for relevant keys from the terminal or with dconf editor.
- kaba0 4y ago
  If implemented well it shouldn’t cost too much energy, it is basically interpolating a value and redrawing it a few times with the GPU.
4y ago

dTal 4y ago

The problem with "alternative" Wayland compositors is that so much more functionality is pushed into the compositor under the Wayland architecture compared to window managers on X11. So it's a ton more work to write a Wayland compositor than an X11 window manager, and most of it is tedious boilerplate that almost certainly has nothing to do with your motivation for writing a new compositor in the first place. This in turn affords many more opportunities to introduce bugs, missing functionality etc. I trust "weird" compositors much less than I trust "weird" X11 window managers - it's more like using an alternative Xorg than an alternative WM. "...there is still a lot of boilerplate involved in writing a compositor, much more than for an X11 window manager, namely setting up your own rendering code, registering and storing input devices and screens in your own data structures, passing input events to windows, calculating bounds for bars and other overlays (courtesy of layer-shell) and others. X11 handles all of this for you..." https://tudorr.ro/blog/technical/2021/01/26/the-wayland-experience/ https://tudorr.ro/blog/technical/2021/01/26/the-wayland-expe... <edit> Several people mentioning wlroots. I can't say I've ever attempted it myself, but if you take a look at the blog post above, the author is very clear on the fact that even with the benefit of wlroots (which they highly praise) writing a Wayland compositor is still a lot more work than writing an X11 window manager (which they have also done, so they are something of an authority). wlroots doesn't abstract everything away, it just gives you a bunch of useful tools. "With Wayland, you handle everything, even with wlroots."

3836293648 4y ago
Yeah, but wlroots is taking the role of Xorg there, leaving WM writers to mostly just write the WM
- Izkata 4y ago
  I'm just wondering how long it'll be until someone uses wlroots to write a client/server architecture like Xorg...
  - TingPing 4y ago
    It will never be a popular way to use Wayland because its just a worse design.

netr0ute 4y ago

How does Hyprland compare to the Pop!_OS tiling system?

E39M5S62 4y ago

It's a shame that they refuse to use a versioned release of wlroots. It makes packaging this needlessly difficult (or impossible, depending on distribution policy).

codetrotter 4y ago
https://wiki.hyprland.org/Getting-Started/Installation/ https://wiki.hyprland.org/Getting-Started/Installation/ has some relevant info relating to this > Arch, NixOS and openSUSE Tumbleweed are very supported. For any other distro (not based on Arch/Nix) you might have varying amounts of success. However, since Hyprland is extremely bleeding-edge, distros like Pop!_OS, Ubuntu, etc. might have major issues running Hyprland. and > This project is under development and is constantly changing. It’s not practical to expect that they will support every distro from the get-go, when they are actively developing it.

friend_and_foe 4y ago

Using sway currently, I intend to check it out. Just so that I know beforehand, can transparency, gaps, animation be turned off?

shaunsingh 4y ago
Yes. All effects are entirely optional

guerrilla 4y ago

This looks beautiful and it's in AUR, so I'm definitely going to try this tomorrow. I've been shopping for a replacement for GNOME because they keep removing features I'm in the middle of my using which is really stressful and I just can't trust them anymore.