3mo ago

Is Hyprland a good WM choice if I can make stacking / floating workflow work?

I've been on the fence since I've been trying Hyprland. What I want out of a window manager / DE is lots of window customization settings (borders, animations, etc.), & having configuration inside one file or one directory with hot-reloading (I'm switching from KDE since its config files all over the place). Hyprland is very popular among WM users with a large ecosystem, though I prefer stacking rather than tiling. I can make it work with some window rules, and shell scripts using hyprctl & jq.

I'm wondering how many little things I will need to fix / figure out. For instance, when I open the firefox bookmarks library with CTRL SHIFT O. When that window is open but not focused, and not on top, if I press CTRL SHIFT O again on a DE it comes back to the top, but not on Hyprland. I could probably find a fix for that?

I might be answering my own question but I really want to hear thoughts.

15 comments

If you prefer stacking then maybe wayfire is worth taking a look at. It's a stacking compositor but it has eyecandy as well.
- Yeah if you prefer stacking/floating windows definitely go for Wayfire or one of the others stacking/floating compositors. There's not much point in using a tiling compositor if you don't like the tiling.
  
  I'm not a tiling guy, and the tabbed mode on sway seems to me like the best I've used. I believe it's a much better experience than stacking compositors by a lot. Having a tab bar, and everything maximized to it (except what I consider is better off floating) is the best I've experienced. Stacking mode is the same just that is uses too much space by stacking the tabs, so I really don't like stacking mode. So sway tabbed mode, in combination with a tiling concept of a workspace per particular objective (I use 10) and a simple bar (yamber) has no alternative on the stacking spectrum of compositors.
  BTW, if going with a stacking compositor, I recommend labwc instead. I found a smoother and way more stable experience than wayfire (some functionality stops working often like sunset functionality, and usually way behind on wlroots support, not a take on wayfire devs, just that I find it more unstable than labwc).
  Of course I'm biased towards less eye candy, though I still appreciate the equivalent to basic picom/compton on the Xorg world, which is the norm on any wayland compositor AFAIK.
- LOTS of eye candy ❤️
1st turnoff for me was the creator added this anime background which overwrote whatever background you had. I found the file and wrote a hook to automatically delete it on update reverting to mt background, only to find that there was a condig option to do the same thing
2nd The maintainer is a bigot and I won't support bigotted projects when there are other (better) options like sway which I know use.
TLDR: Creator violates Wheatons Law. I don't like that.
- There's an option in the config to replace the default anime background by a more sober one with the hyprland logo (wish I had know that BEFORE doing a presentation on a large second screen for the first time and realizing that hyprpaper kept my custom background on my workspaces but defaulted to the anime wallpaper on the second screen because in hyprpaper backgrounds are configured per screen 😂 ). And no matter whether you use that option or not, it shouldn't overwrite the background you choose. It's displayed only if you don't have any background configured. Otherwise it's either a bug or misconfiguration in hyprpaper.
  Definitely not going to defend the dev on the other stuff.
  
  Overwrite wasn't the best choice of words. Display in place of is better. There's a literal option now called "disable hyperchan" If you use that config, you don't need to do anything else. But, having a dev introduce a feature which supercedes users' deliberate choices for his, and his cronies amusement was reason enough to leave.
I use labwc .. it's basically OpenBox as a Wayland Compositor. Some things/programs work better than Hyprland, other things worse. No animations - just get out of your way functionality.
I found a patch that allows manual tiling and focus (eg. alt-tabbing just for windows in the left half of the screen), which is cool.
Scriptability isn't there, but the code looks pretty clean.
The config file is similar to OpenBox. I miss multi-layer keybindings though.
You might try tabbed mode instead of stacking mode. It's great, as mentioned in some comment I made, I'm not a tiling guide, but the tabbed mode on sway is great. I would guess it's available on hyprland since it borrows some concepts from sway. However if you find a lot of trouble on hyprland enabling it (I guess you shouldn't) you might try sway. Beware you need exceptions because otherwise everything shows up maximized, but that's not hard byt reading the man pages, compositor documentation, and looking around on the web. BTW, on sway this global config gives tabbed mode on all workspaces: workspace_layout tabbed and of course you can chenge it to stacking, or tiling whenever you want on any workspace...
If your looking to switch between things like stack/float/tile then I'd recommend sway or awesome, sway has the ability out of the box (iirc super+space) to toggle floating whereas in hypr you need to add or uncomment a line granted both are live update configs so you don't have to do the dwm rebuild type kerfuffle but still it's one more thing to get up and running where like I said sway has it natively and awesome has rules for auto-tiling. I've used all three pretty extensively and while I love hyprland for its animations I feel it's config needs a lot of tweaking, honestly so does sway and awesome but I still like them > hyprland.
... that there ...
Dwm gang. Worth learning C over. Just works once u know what ur doing
I started using cosmic de which supports both and it's been nice despite not being complete

15 comments