Hyprland

Hyprland is a Wayland compositor for Linux users who want tiling window management without giving up visual polish. It's aimed at people who currently run Sway, i3, or another tiling setup and want more animation, blur, and shadow support, plus a plugin ecosystem, while still getting a fast, keyboard-driven workflow.

Unlike most Wayland compositors, Hyprland is written from scratch and does not depend on wlroots, libweston, KWin, or Mutter. That gives the maintainers full control over the compositor's internals and lets them ship Wayland protocol support and features quickly, at the cost of a larger codebase to maintain independently.

Key features

• Eye candy: gradient borders, blur, drop shadows, and animations driven by custom bezier curves.
• Independence: no wlroots, libweston, KWin, or Mutter underneath; the compositor is built on its own.
• Plugin system: a built-in plugin manager plus a plugin API for extending or replacing compositor behavior.
• Dynamic tiling: fully dynamic workspaces with two built-in layouts (dwindle and master), with more layouts available as plugins.
• Window management extras: pseudotiling, floating, fullscreen, window groups (tabbed mode), and special workspaces (scratchpads).
• Tearing support: optional screen tearing for lower input latency in games.
• Rules engine: window, monitor, and layer rules for controlling placement, size, and behavior per app or output.
• Instant config reload: changes to the config file apply as soon as you save, no restart needed.
• IPC: a socket-based IPC interface for scripting and external tooling.
• Input method support: native support for input method editors (IME) and input panels.
• Global keybind passthrough: lets specific apps receive global keybinds directly.

Ideal use cases

Hyprland fits Linux desktop users who want a tiling window manager as their daily driver and care about how the desktop looks, not just how it functions. It's a good match if you're coming from Sway or i3 and want blur, animations, and shadows without switching to a full desktop environment like GNOME or KDE.

It also suits people who want to script their desktop through IPC, write custom plugins, or need window/monitor rules that go beyond what stock tiling WMs offer. Gamers who want tearing support for lower latency in fullscreen games are another fit.

It's not a good fit if you need a stable, slow-moving compositor for a production machine where breakage is costly; Hyprland moves fast and ships bleeding-edge features, which means occasional regressions. It's also not the right choice if you want a compositor backed by wlroots (for broader hardware/driver compatibility already tested elsewhere) or if you need a polished, beginner-friendly desktop environment with GUI settings out of the box, since Hyprland is configured through text files and expects some comfort with Linux config editing.

Installation

The project's install and setup instructions live on the official wiki rather than in the README itself. The general path is:

1. Check the wiki's Installation page for your distribution; many distros package Hyprland directly (Arch, Fedora, and others have community or official packages).
2. If a package isn't available, or you want the latest source, build from source. As a C++ project, this typically means:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/hyprwm/Hyprland
cd Hyprland
make all
sudo make install

(Exact build commands and required dependencies, such as wayland-protocols, pixman, and a recent Wayland/EGL stack, are listed on the wiki since Hyprland's dependency set changes as it tracks new Wayland features.)

3. After installing, start Hyprland from a TTY or via a display manager entry, then configure it through the config file described in the Configure guide linked from the project.

Because Hyprland tracks new Wayland protocol features aggressively, using a recent kernel, Mesa, and Wayland library stack is expected. Check the wiki before filing issues if something doesn't build, since dependency versions matter more here than in most compositors.