Hyprland: The Minimalist and Fully Customizable Wayland Window Manager

In the landscape of modern Wayland-based window managers, Hyprland has quickly established itself as one of the most interesting solutions for those seeking total control, high performance, and a modern aesthetic without sacrificing lightness. It’s not a traditional desktop environment, but a dynamic tiling window manager that delegates every choice to the user.

This approach makes it particularly appreciated by Arch Linux users, power users, and developers who desire an essential, coherent, and custom-built system.

What is Hyprland and Why Choose It

Hyprland is a dynamic Wayland compositor that stands out for its highly configurable nature and excellent performance. Unlike more mature solutions like Sway (the Wayland port of i3), Hyprland focuses on a modern visual experience with smooth animations, advanced graphical effects, and an extremely flexible window management system.

Performance and Rendering

One of Hyprland’s most appreciated features is its attention to graphics performance. The compositor is written in C++ and fully leverages modern graphics hardware capabilities, ensuring:

These characteristics make Hyprland ideal not only for daily work but also for those who need a responsive environment for gaming, video editing, or graphic development.

Dynamic Tiling and Workspace Management

Hyprland implements a particularly intelligent dynamic tiling system. Unlike purely manual or automatic approaches, Hyprland offers:

The “dwindle” layout automatically divides space in a fibonacci-like manner, optimizing screen usage. The “master” layout maintains a prominent main window with other windows in a side column.

Visual Effects and Aesthetic Customization

One of Hyprland’s strengths is the wealth of aesthetic options available without compromising performance:

These features allow creating a visually coherent and modern environment while maintaining the underlying minimalist philosophy.

Compatibility and Application Support

Being a pure Wayland compositor, Hyprland offers:

Minimalist Philosophy

Hyprland follows an extremely clear philosophy: provide only what is strictly necessary to manage windows and graphical input. It doesn’t include notifications, panels, launchers, login managers, or accessory services.

On Arch Linux, this philosophy is evident even at the packaging level: between the AUR and official packages, the only truly functional and maintained package is hyprland (to be downloaded via pacman). Everything else in the environment is chosen, installed, and configured manually.

This results in:
- absence of bloat,
- minimal dependencies,
- full awareness of every running component.
The result is a lightweight, fast, and predictable environment.

Simple and Centralized Configuration

One of Hyprland’s strengths is the simplicity of its configuration. Everything revolves around a single main file: ~/.config/hypr/hyprland.conf

Within this file, you can define keybindings, configure monitors and workspaces, set animations and decorations, create rules for specific applications, and include separate configuration files (source).

Configuration Examples

The syntax is clear, readable, and immediate, even for those coming from other window managers like i3 or sway. Here are some practical examples:

Monitor configuration:

monitor=eDP-1,1920x1080@60,0x0,1
monitor=HDMI-A-1,2560x1440@144,1920x0,1

Custom keybindings:

bind=SUPER,Return,exec,kitty
bind=SUPER,Q,killactive
bind=SUPER,F,togglefloating
bind=SUPER,1,workspace,1

Animations and effects:

animations {
    enabled=true
    bezier=smoothOut,0.36,0,0.66,-0.56
    animation=windows,1,3,smoothOut,slide
}

Window rules:

windowrule=float,^(pavucontrol)$
windowrule=workspace 2,^(firefox)$
windowrulev2=opacity 0.9,class:^(kitty)$

Many modifications can be applied without restarting the session using the hyprctl reload command, making the workflow extremely fluid and iterative.

Staff note: You don’t even need to read the official wiki (https://wiki.hyprland.org/) to get started with Hyprland. Many users have shared their configurations on GitHub, making it extremely easy to find complete and functional setups to start from. Just search for “hyprland dotfiles” on any search engine or directly on GitHub to access hundreds of ready-made, commented, and customizable configurations. This community-driven approach allows you to have a functional environment in just a few minutes, then study the configuration to adapt it to your needs.

Hyprctl: The Control Tool

Hyprland provides hyprctl, a powerful tool to interact with the compositor at runtime:

This allows creating advanced scripts for custom automations or integrations with other tools.

Essential Software for a Hyprland Setup

Since Hyprland only provides the compositor, it’s necessary to build the environment by selecting Wayland-compatible tools.
All software in this article is FOSS and recommended by our staff.

xdg-desktop-portal-hyprland: An Indispensable Component

A fundamental element in a modern Hyprland setup is xdg-desktop-portal-hyprland. This portal is necessary to ensure screen sharing (WebRTC, browsers, OBS), correct screenshots, Flatpak integration, and coherent file picker and permissions management.

Without this component, many Wayland applications simply don’t work correctly or lose key functionality. In a well-configured Hyprland system, the Hyprland portal should be considered mandatory.

Notifications

For notification management, there are several options: swaync is complete and modern, with a persistent notification panel; mako is minimalist and extremely lightweight; dunst is historic and highly configurable, with Wayland support.

Clipboard Manager

An often underestimated but extremely useful tool is copyq. CopyQ provides advanced clipboard history, support for images and text, customizable shortcuts, and perfect Wayland integration. In minimalist environments like Hyprland, it quickly becomes indispensable.

Application Launcher

To launch applications and commands, you can use rofi (with Wayland backend), wofi, or ulauncher. The choice depends on the level of scriptability and desired aesthetics.

Terminal Emulator

Commonly used terminals are foot (minimalist and Wayland-native), kitty (powerful and GPU-accelerated), and ptyxis (modern GTK terminal, well-integrated).

Shell

The shell profoundly influences the experience. Fish is user-friendly and immediate, while zsh is highly customizable.

Session Startup

For a clean Wayland session startup, you can use uwsm (Universal Wayland Session Manager), which properly manages environment variables and improves integration with display managers and applications.

Login Manager

Hyprland is agnostic regarding the login manager. The main options are SDDM, greetd/tuigreet, and ly. The choice depends on the desired level of minimalism.

Status Bar

For the status bar, waybar is extremely modular while ironbar represents a modern and clean alternative.

Idle Manager and Lockscreen

In a Wayland environment, inactivity management and lockscreen are separate components.

Idle Manager

Swayidle is a proven, simple, and effective solution. Hypridle is a Hyprland-specific project, with native integration and coherent configuration. They allow managing screen shutdown, suspension, and automatic lockscreen startup.

Lockscreen

Swaylock is solid and minimal, while hyprlock is designed specifically for Hyprland, with advanced support for themes and animations. The hypridle + hyprlock combination represents today’s most integrated and coherent solution.

Conclusion

Hyprland is not designed for those looking for a “ready-to-use” desktop. It’s designed for those who want to build their environment with surgical precision.

Centralized configuration, components chosen one by one, maximum Wayland integration, and total aesthetic and functional freedom make Hyprland an excellent choice for advanced users.

On Arch Linux, where hyprland is the only fundamental package and everything else is the user’s responsibility, this philosophy emerges clearly.

Hyprland is not just a window manager: it’s a framework for the modern Linux desktop, combining the flexibility of dynamic tiling with the performance of a next-generation Wayland compositor and the freedom of total customization from the open source ecosystem.