Jeena's Hyprland Demo

I used i3 previously (2013–2016), and after a few years back on Windows (2016–2021), decided to try Sway on my current laptop (mid-2021), which happens to have a 1.5× panel.

Not everything has always been smooth, but at some point when I was needing to do screen sharing via Zoom I had to switch back to i3, and the comparison was more stark than I remembered.

On i3:

Tearing (graphical glitches) is terrible, especially if you’re doing screen sharing. I can’t use my XF86AudioMicMute key because its keycode is 256 and X only supports 8-bit codes. The touchpad doesn’t work well. Scaling stuff is a total mess, a mess that you can mostly get to work, but you’ll need to set four different environment variables and run a gsettings daemon and set these three properties and add this file to this location and that one to that and modify your Chromium flags and I probably even forgot a couple of steps.

On Wayland:

Tearing is solved. I had to modify the keymap to get XF86AudioMicMute¹, which I suspect was because of X compatibility, but then it works. The touchpad works very well, gestures, scroll rates and all. Scaling is robust and automatic, if you have an integer scaling factor or are willing to settle for render-at-next-integer-and-downsample, which is a bad technique but good enough for Apple; and compositors now support proper fractional scaling, and apps are more commonly implementing it (though I’m distressed it took so long). Firefox Nightly has just this week finally fixed the last problem that I’ve noticed, and I hope they’ll default-enable Wayland fractional scaling and Wayland soon.

The only thing I feel Sway’s behind in now is its lack of per-window screen sharing. Other than that, it’s very solidly better than i3 in every way: in convenience (things work better out of the box), in robustness (features that exist don’t have issues) and in features.

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¹ Ran `xkbcomp $DISPLAY keymap.xkb`, then modified that file by changing `maximum = 255;` to `maximum = 256;`, and adding in appropriate places `<I256> = 256;` and `key <I256> { [ XF86AudioMicMute ] };`. Then, in ~/.config/sway/config, `input * xkb_file "~/.config/sway/keymap.xkb"` or similar.

Give Niri a few days of your time. It's exactly what you're looking for.

I moved from i3 to sway — an i3 clone built as a Wayland compositor — specifically to banish screen tearing from my experience.

Wayland’s architecture makes tearing inherently less likely not the least reason being that the compositor synchronizes all drawing with the display rate. X11 is much more of a free for all.

Check out https://github.com/outfoxxed/hy3. I use it for i3 capabilities on top of Hypr. It's AWESOME.

For me, it was getting a laptop with a high DPI screen, and the frustrations in getting X to play nicely with that.

There were annoyances when I realised I could no longer use certain workhorses (e.g. feh), but usually a bit of digging turned up a drop-in replacement (e.g. imv).

Mine, too. And conky. And how I loved those configurable shortcuts…

If you use i3, you can switch to Sway.

Actually, typing this out led me to find a fix for the multiscreen workspace issue I was having. Basically the solution is to first assign the workspaces to monitors, and then bind the hotkeys to switch both workspaces at once, with the final binding being the one you land at.

If someone wants to steal my homework, this is what I did

  # use `hyprctl monitors` to get your monitors' names, replace DP-3 and HDMI-A-1 as appropriate

  workspace = 1, monitor:DP-3, default:true
  workspace = 2, monitor:HDMI-A-1, default:true
  workspace = 3, monitor:DP-3
  workspace = 4, monitor:HDMI-A-1
  workspace = 5, monitor:DP-3
  workspace = 6, monitor:HDMI-A-1
  workspace = 7, monitor:DP-3
  workspace = 8, monitor:HDMI-A-1

  unbind = SUPER, code:10
  unbind = SUPER, code:11
  unbind = SUPER, code:12
  unbind = SUPER, code:13
  unbind = SUPER, code:14
  unbind = SUPER, code:15
  unbind = SUPER, code:16
  unbind = SUPER, code:17

  bindd = SUPER, code:10, Switch to workspace 1, workspace, 2
  bindd = SUPER, code:10, Switch to workspace 1, workspace, 1
  bindd = SUPER, code:11, Switch to workspace 2, workspace, 1
  bindd = SUPER, code:11, Switch to workspace 2, workspace, 2
  bindd = SUPER, code:12, Switch to workspace 3, workspace, 4
  bindd = SUPER, code:12, Switch to workspace 3, workspace, 3
  bindd = SUPER, code:13, Switch to workspace 4, workspace, 3
  bindd = SUPER, code:13, Switch to workspace 4, workspace, 4
  bindd = SUPER, code:14, Switch to workspace 5, workspace, 6
  bindd = SUPER, code:14, Switch to workspace 5, workspace, 5
  bindd = SUPER, code:15, Switch to workspace 6, workspace, 5
  bindd = SUPER, code:15, Switch to workspace 6, workspace, 6
  bindd = SUPER, code:16, Switch to workspace 7, workspace, 8
  bindd = SUPER, code:16, Switch to workspace 7, workspace, 7
  bindd = SUPER, code:17, Switch to workspace 8, workspace, 7
  bindd = SUPER, code:17, Switch to workspace 8, workspace, 8

One thing I love about Hyprland (and Sway, which I was using before it) is the ability to have a key-combination which takes me straight to where I want.

Is this possible on Niri, where the virtual desktop expands infinitely?

Having tried Niri, it's probising but very much not ready for primetime yet. And extremely miserable to use without a trackpad, as opposed to all other tiling WMs that are keyboard first.

Agreed. I don't find automatic tiling that useful in general because you don't really get strong layout control but I also never found say i3 or manual tiling that useful on a small laptop screen. (It's pretty nice on a large screen or ultrawide, though)

However Niri works fantastically in both use cases because it gives me what I really want: Resizable, rearrangeable columns of windows, as many as I need for the current task and a way to quickly rearrange and spatially navigate so that I can see exactly what I need to see.

I second this. I first got exposed to this concept via the gnome extension, PaperWM. Now using Niri as well.

It looks similar with the difference of scrolling. Kind of interesting, and you still can have stacks of windows. But how does it decide on how wide a window should be?

The horizontal scrolling was the only thing i HATED about Windows 8. It's nauseating

Can anyone explain why tiling managers are useful? Seems like a waste of space to me. I prefer having my various windows all over the place and just alt-tabbing between (or using other means of opening the right app). I highly prefer having the app I am working on to be in the center of the screen, so that is what makes sense for me.

Give Rectangle a go. I’ve used it for years and love it.

Thirds, quarters, sixths. Move windows to the next screen. Increase and decrease size.. so many nice things you can do with just the keyboard.

Its keyboard shortcuts are so deeply in my brain I could rattle them off while operating heavy machinery :)

Check out AeroSpace (https://github.com/nikitabobko/AeroSpace). I've been a happy user for the last 8 months or so.

I'm demoing my own system, this is how I set it up and this is how I use it and the transparency is a integral part of the esthetic.

Having said that, I guess the compression of the video makes it less sharp and contrasty as it is in real life. But all code is shared in the original with a link in the description if someone really wants to dig deeper into it.

For the same reason people dress differently: it looks cool, futuristic, makes it more individual, and makes it feel good to use their own system. I am with you on this preference: transparency is distracting to me, but I see the appeal - I ran transparent terminals 20 years ago.