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.
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 tabbedand of course you can chenge it to stacking, or tiling whenever you want on any workspace…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.
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.
