My first (and last) Linux ricing with Hyprland

Top bar, left side

• The Banana logo
  • Opens the power menu with shutdown, suspend, and hybernate options
• Finder menu
  • Shows the title of the currently focused application, or “Finder” if no application is focused
• File menu
  • Opens the file manager; I use (rarely) Nemo from the Cinnamon desktop
• Edit menu
  • Opens the document viewer (papers)
• View menu
  • Opens the image viewer (loupe)
• Help menu
  • Opens the Arch Wiki

Top bar, right side

I spent a lot of time poring over the Waybar Wiki.

• Idle inhibitor
  • To this day, I still have no idea whether it works or not; it is a remnant of waybar-macos-sequoia.
• Temperature indicator
  • Shows the temperature in Kelvin
• CPU indicator
  • The tooltip cannot be customized yet, but I’m eagerly waiting for this feature
• Ram indicator
  • The tooltip shows the used and available GB of both memory and swap
• Network indicator
  • Shows WiFi frequency and signal strength
  • Clicking it switches to alt mode, showing network interface, IP, and netmask
• Sound indicator
  • Shows speaker and mic volume
  • Clicking it does nothing at the moment, but I’d like to find a good GUI
  • The tooltip is also boring
  • Speaker volume can be changed with fn keys
• Brightness indicator
  • Brightness can be changed with fn keys
• Battery indicator
  • Shows battery status (plugged or not) and percentage
  • The tooltip shows the power drawn in Watts, which is usually around 13mW, and the health of the battery, including the number of cycles
• Date and time indicator
  • Shows date and time
  • The tooltip is a month calendar
  • Clicking it switches to alt mode, where the calendar is for the full year instead of just one month
  • Scrolling up or down moves the calendar backwards and forwards in time (I had to tune the smooth-scrolling-threshold to make it work nicely for me)

Bottom bar

Tweaking the style of this bar was most difficult, but I am rather satisfied now. The bar has the Arch logo as a fixed component, a taskbar showing the open application windows, and a trash bin icon as another fixed component. I wanted the fixed components because the bar looked ugly when no windows were open. Besides, the Arch logo is supposed to replace the Finder app in macOS.

• Arch logo
  • Just a custom component with a static background image
  • Clicking it opens an application launcher
  • Replaces the Finder app in macOS
• Taskbar
  • Shows all open windows
  • The currently focused one has a black dot below (made with the box-shadow CSS property)
• Trash bin icon
  • I should think of something to do open when I click on it
  • Similar to the Arch logo, this is just a static background image
  • Who needs a trash bin when I can just rm -rf?

Copypasta

First, I use cliphist as clipboard manager. Pressing ALT SHIFT + V opens a menu with the clipboard history, and I can select any entry to be pasted. This trick is already officially documented, but I added a tr -d '\n' to the --pre-display-cmd in order to remove the newlines, because each entry had an empty line due to a trailing '\n'. Note that this only affects the entries in the menu: the newlines will still be there when I paste the clipboard content.

exec-once = wl-paste --primary --watch cliphist store
bind = $mainMod SHIFT, V, exec, cliphist list | wofi --dmenu --pre-display-cmd "echo '%s' | cut -f 2 | tr -d '\n'" | cliphist decode | wl-copy

Since I am going for a macOS vibe, I couldn’t help using the ALT key for copying and pasting. Linux already has shortcuts, but they are inconsistent across applications. Normally, we can use CTRL + C and CTRL + V, but in the terminal, these keys have a different function, so we use CTRL SHIFT + C and CTRL SHIFT + V. Thus, remapping ALT + C to CTRL + C wouldn’t have worked, unless I wanted to accidentally send SIGINTs to my processes. Luckily, I found an incredible trick in this blog post. Apparently Linux supports alternative shortcuts for copying and pasting: CTRL + INSERT and SHIFT + INSERT. So, I could simply add these lines to my hypr.conf:

bind = $mainMod, C, sendshortcut, CTRL, INSERT,
bind = $mainMod, V, sendshortcut, SHIFT, INSERT,

Screenshots

grim and slum work pretty well together. I set up these shortcuts using the Print key to capture either the full screen or a custom selection. The screenshot is then both copied to the clipboard and saved to a file. I also get a notification to confirm that everything worked. The vast majority of my screenshots are used only once, so I live to save them under /tmp, just like my browser downloads.

bind = SHIFT, Print, exec, grim - | tee /tmp/$(date +'%Y%m%d_%H%M%S').png | wl-copy && notify-send "Screenshot captured"
bind = , Print, exec, grim -g "$(slurp)" - | tee /tmp/$(date +'%Y%m%d_%H%M%S').png | wl-copy && notify-send "Screenshot captured"

Blur

In my original set up, I disabled blur effects because they can be battery-hungry, and one of my goals is to increase the lifetime of my laptop’s battery as much as possible. However, as user WesternSpy96 pointed out in Reddit, this is unacceptable if I want to be true to the macOS spirit, and this encouraged me to try and enable blur only when the laptop is plugged. There are many ways to do this, but since we can write the config file in Lua, I just set:

hl.config({
    [...]
    decoration = {
        [...]
        shadow = {
            enabled = tonumber(io.open("/sys/class/power_supply/AC/online"):read(1)), -- True if AC-powered
            [...]
        },
        blur = {
            enabled = tonumber(io.open("/sys/class/power_supply/AC/online"):read(1)), -- True if AC-powered
            [...]
        }
    },
}

The decoration:blur:enabled keyword can be either 0 or 1. Conveniently, the file /sys/class/power_supply/AC/online is also 0 (when unplugged) or 1 (when plugged). So, I simply set the decoration value to what’s inside that file. Note that this only checks when Hyprland starts up, so it won’t detect when I plug or unplug the laptop in the middle of a session.

To fix that, I created a systemd user unit that can programmatically enable or disable blur in my Hyprland sessions. It is a bit tricky because it needs to send a command to Hyprland from outside of Hyprland, but gladfully it can be done.

[Unit]
Description=Toggle Hyprland Blur (State: %i)

[Service]
Type=oneshot
# %i will be replaced by 1 or 0
ExecStart=/bin/sh -c 'for instance in `/usr/bin/hyprctl instances | sed -n \"s/^instance \(.*\):/\1/p\"`; do hyprctl --instance $$instance eval "hl.config({ decoration = { blur = { enabled = %i } } })"; done'

I made the unit as a template so that I could pass the value for disabling or enabling blur directly in the name of the unit when I want to run it. The way it works is that I copy this unit to ~/.config/systemd/user/hypr-blur@.service, and then I can run it with systemctl --user start hypr-blur@0 (to disable blur) or systemctl --user start hypr-blur@1 (to enable it). The part after @ will be captured in the %i placeholder inside the unit.

The unit on its own is only half of the story: I still needed a way to call it upon plugging events. For this, I created a custom udev rule with some help from the AI overlords:

# AC plugged in -> start hypr-blur@1.service
SUBSYSTEM=="power_supply", KERNEL=="AC", ATTR{online}=="1", RUN+="/usr/bin/systemctl --machine=edrix@.host --user start hypr-blur@1.service"

# AC unplugged -> start hypr-blur@0.service
SUBSYSTEM=="power_supply", KERNEL=="AC", ATTR{online}=="0", RUN+="/usr/bin/systemctl --machine=edrix@.host --user start hypr-blur@0.service"

I saved these lines in a file under /etc/udev/rules.d/11-hyprland.rules. Now whenever I am plugged I can please my eyes with blurred background behind waybar and wofi menus, while saving precious power whenever I am running on battery.

Process scheduling strategy

After some time using Hyprland, I noticed a warning in the start-up messages: “Failed to change process scheduling strategy”. According to the AI overlords, Hyprland tries to assign itself real-time process scheduling priority (SCHED_RR/SCHED_FIFO) to reduce input and rendering latency, but your user session lacks the necessary kernel permissions (such as CAP_SYS_NICE or configured real-time limits) to change scheduling strategies.

As a temporary fix, I ran:

sudo setcap cap_sys_nice+ep $(which Hyprland)

This will be overwritten the next time I update hyprland, but let’s see if it fixes it before finding a more permanent solution.