Hyprland

Hyprland is a tiling Wayland Compositor. Unlike GNOME which bundles a compositor with a full desktop environment, Hyprland is just the compositor — you assemble the rest (panel, launcher, wallpaper, notifications) yourself from standalone tools.

It is known for smooth animations, fine-grained configuration, and a strong aesthetic — but requires significant setup effort.

Core Concepts

Tiling Window Management

Instead of floating windows you drag around, Hyprland automatically arranges windows to fill the screen without overlap:

One window:          Two windows:         Three windows:
┌──────────────┐     ┌──────┬───────┐     ┌──────┬───┬───┐
│              │     │      │       │     │      │   │   │
│   Terminal   │     │ Term │  Vim  │     │ Term │ A │ B │
│              │     │      │       │     │      │   │   │
└──────────────┘     └──────┴───────┘     └──────┴───┴───┘

When you open a new window, it splits the available space. When you close one, the others expand to fill the gap. Everything is keyboard-driven by default.

Workspaces

Hyprland has 10 workspaces (virtual desktops). Each workspace is an independent tiling layout.

• Super + 1-9 — switch to workspace N
• Super + Shift + 1-9 — move focused window to workspace N
• Super + Scroll — cycle through workspaces

Floating Windows

Specific windows can be set to float (behave like normal draggable windows) via window rules:

windowrulev2 = float, class:^(org.gnome.Nautilus)$
windowrulev2 = float, title:^(Picture-in-Picture)$

Configuration

Hyprland is configured entirely through ~/.config/hypr/hyprland.conf. There is no GUI settings panel.

Important

If you log into a Hyprland session without a config file, you get a completely blank screen — no panel, no launcher, no way to open a terminal. You would need to switch TTY (Ctrl + Alt + F2) to recover. Always create a minimal config before starting your first session.

Minimal Config Structure

# Monitor layout
monitor=,preferred,auto,1
 
# Autostart
exec-once = waybar
exec-once = hyprpaper
 
# Key bindings
bind = SUPER, Return, exec, kitty          # Open terminal
bind = SUPER, Q, killactive               # Close window
bind = SUPER, 1, workspace, 1             # Switch workspace
bind = SUPER SHIFT, 1, movetoworkspace, 1 # Move window
 
# Window layout
general {
  gaps_in = 5
  gaps_out = 10
  border_size = 2
}
 
animations {
  enabled = true
}

Key Binding Syntax

bind = MODIFIER, KEY, ACTION, ARGS
bind = SUPER, Return, exec, kitty
bind = SUPER SHIFT, Q, exit             # Exit Hyprland
bind = SUPER, F, fullscreen
bind = SUPER, V, togglefloating

Ecosystem

Since Hyprland ships with nothing except the compositor, you build your desktop from these tools:

Tool	Role
Waybar	Panel / status bar
Rofi / Wofi	App launcher
Hyprpaper / Swaybg	Wallpaper
Hyprlock / Swaylock	Screen lock
Hypridle	Idle daemon (triggers lock)
Mako / Dunst	Notifications
Kitty / Ghostty / Foot	Terminal

Hyprland vs GNOME

	GNOME	Hyprland
Setup time	Works immediately	Hours of config
Mouse-friendly	Yes	Possible but not the point
Keyboard-centric	Partially	Fully
Floating windows	Default	Optional (window rules)
Panel, launcher, etc.	Included	You choose and configure each
Config format	GUI + dconf	Single text file
Animation quality	Good	Exceptional
App compatibility	Excellent	Good (some XWayland issues)
Learning curve	Low	High

XDG Desktop Portal

On Wayland, apps that need to access the camera, share the screen, or open a file picker must go through the XDG Desktop Portal — a D-Bus service that mediates between sandboxed apps and the compositor.

Hyprland requires its own portal implementation. Two packages are needed:

• xdg-desktop-portal-hyprland — handles screen sharing
• xdg-desktop-portal-gtk — fallback for camera access and file pickers

Note

Without the GTK portal as a fallback, camera access in Chrome/Chromium may not work even with PipeWire correctly configured. See Linux Audio for the PipeWire stack.

NixOS

On NixOS, configure portals declaratively:

xdg.portal = {
  enable = true;
  extraPortals = [
    pkgs.xdg-desktop-portal-hyprland
    pkgs.xdg-desktop-portal-gtk
  ];
  configPackages = [ pkgs.hyprland ];
};