Trying Hyprland

Hyprland is sort of the new kid on the Wayland compositor block. I’ve just gotten my Sway config ported over to it and I’m going to be test driving it the next couple of days. Here’s a couple thoughts on the setup process while it’s fresh in my mind.

The main reason anyone would want to try Hyprland over Sway is most likely eye-candy. If you’ve looked at the unixporn subreddit any time over the past several months you’ve almost certainly seen some Hyprland setups. I’ve got all the fancy settings like blur and shadows disabled in the name of power savings, but I’m still using animations and rounded corners. They’re starting to grow on me. I’m realizing that animations especially aren’t just eye candy, but they also help illustrate to the user what’s happening while you’re moving and opening windows, etc.

Porting over my Sway config wasn’t too bad since most utilities that work in Sway also work in Hyprland or any other wl-roots based compositor. The worst offender though was Waybar, which for some reason needs a special build for full generic wl-roots support. The AUR has a package that makes that easy, but I could see that being annoying on non-Arch distros. Other than that, I just went line by line through my Sway config and adapted it for Hyprland’s syntax.

One thing I’m really liking is Hyprland’s dwindle tiling mode. The first window I open will be to the side, then the one after that goes below, then to the side… It makes really efficient use of screen space in my opinion. In Sway I needed to run a script to get similar tiling logic.

So far, I’m impressed with Hyprland’s resource usage. Its CPU usage is a lot lower than when I last checked out Hyprland a while ago. Memory usage currently is just below 200M. That’s about double Sway’s but still reasonable I think.

I’m excited to see how this experiment pans out. If it works out I could easily see myself sticking with Hyprland full time.