Hyprland Test Drive

I’ve spent a week now with Hyprland and I’ve decided I’m going to continue with it instead of Sway. It’s a little more beta compared to Sway which has been rock solid for a while, but here are some of the things that have made the switch worth it to me.

What I like

Hyprland’s tiling behavior is more intuitive to me. I’m using the BSPWM-like dwindle layout, but there’s a master-stack layout available too. I find that Hyprland’s animations make managing multiple windows easier than on Sway, where everything just instantly jumps into position. There’s also a lot of little usability touches here and there which I think add up to making Hyprland more user friendly than Sway.

Hyprland’s scratchpad behavior also makes more sense to me. On Sway, bringing your scratchpad forward just brings whatever’s on it to your current workspace as a floating window. Hyprland instead has what it calls special workspaces. These are fully functional tiling workspaces which can have multiple windows and are displayed over your current workspace. Maybe there’s a way to get similar behavior out of Sway, but this seems a lot more useful to me.

It’s still beta

The only problems I’ve run into during this first week are related to using multiple monitors.

Some of this is just due to quirks with Hyprland’s behavior. For example, I can use the movefocus dispatcher to move my focus between different monitors, but only if those monitors have windows open on them. For empty monitors I have to use the separate focusmonitor dispatcher.

There’s also a couple of what more obviously seem like bugs. One weird one is that if I have some windows on my primary display and an empty workspace on my secondary display, trying to move one of my windows to a new empty workspace will move it to the existing empty workspace on my secondary display while also creating a new empty workspace on my primary.

So Hyprland is still obviously beta, but it’s at least been a pretty stable one and I haven’t had to deal with anything major.

I’m looking forward to seeing where Hyprland’s development takes it from here.