 So a couple of days ago, I made a video about Wayland and in that video I've told you that I finally got hyperland up and running and I split the these two videos in Parts simply because I wanted to be more positive in this one That one was very ranty very rambly and I wanted to talk a little bit more positively about hyperland And I figured I probably couldn't do that if I spent the entire time bitching about Wayland So today I'm gonna be talking about my time with hyperland now I've been using it now for a little while and I have some thoughts and some of them are really good some of them are Not so good. So let's go ahead and jump in hyperland is Overall a very good window manager, and I'm gonna call this a window manager even though I know it's a Wayland composer. You don't have to get in the comments and tell me that I'm calling it something wrong I'm gonna call these things window managers whether you like them or whether you like it or not So we're just gonna bypass that let me call it what I wanted to call it and we'll move on hyperland is a very good window manager it is a Very customizable window manager the syntax of the configuration file is very easy to understand very easy to use and even if you were going to get into customizing the animations and Customizing how the window manager pops up windows and all the stuff that hyperland can do Doing so in a configuration in the configuration file is very easy to do and the documentation is also very good in that aspect it does a very good job of guiding you through all the stuff that hyperland can do so Those two aspects are very very positive And I'm very impressed with the fact that it is as full-featured as it is Considering the fact that it is a very new window manager. It's only been around for a little while Yes, it is based on something that was before But even the thing that it's based off from hasn't been around that long when you compare it to other window managers that have been around for 20 years you have to be somewhat impressed that hyperland has come as far as it has in the small amount of time that they've been Given so I'm very impressed with the features that it has and if you see my hyperland right here You'll see That it does a lot of really cool things that I really like so the animations I could probably take or leave to be honest with you they're a little frivolous and I don't know if I were to use as long term if I'd keep them and The thing about all that is is that if you turn the animations off You have to consider what does hyperland give you that you know some other window manager doesn't because the animations are a big deal Are a big part of hyperland so I haven't turned them off because it does feel like if I turn them off I'd be Taking something away from what hyperland is supposed to be to be honest with you I'd probably at least speed them up because they do kind of it it does feel like it's slow It makes things a little sluggish They're not slow by any means like if you if you use genome back in the early genome three days You know what slow animations really look like this is not that even at the default settings Which I have them right now, you know, the animations are fine But you can slow them down the configuration file So I actually show you the hyperland configuration file. It looks like this And as you can see it's just a matter of Some regular syntax. There's nothing horrible here. There's no JSON. There's no yaml It's not in a programming language of any sort. It just works It looks very very easy And it comes across that way. It's very well documented as well, too So it gives you it gives you links to the wiki so you can see More detail about what you're supposed to do in each of these sections, which is really nice You can source files if you wanted to have a multi file configuration file So that's taken care of that's something that i3 didn't get until like version 4.20 So the fact that they have that built-in is really quite awesome So there are a lot of positives here when it comes to the actual usage So that I wanted to start off with the positive stuff because there are a lot of things about this that I do really really like And I like the rounded corners. I think that's fantastic I like the fact that you can set two or even three colors for the border And and if you set up set it up properly You can have it so that the border is kind of animated so that the gradient kind of goes round and round in circles That's really cool Like I said, the rounded corners are really nice. It has built-in blur. So you don't have to have You know because it's wayland You don't have to have a compositor like you would an x organ in order to get blur All that stuff works well and because it's a wayland compositor and you don't have to have pycom setting on top of it The resource usage is actually really nice when you compare it to something that has pycom running because All the blur affects the rounded corners all the animations and stuff like that is taken care of at a lower level Meaning that there's not as much resource usage. It's really quite good I do like that they have a couple built-in layouts. I think they have three Maybe only two but they do have some built-in layouts And the the default one is a dwindle layout kind of like a fibonacci layout And I switched to the master stack layout Which is the one that I prefer and these layouts do have some options that you can choose between so you can Change the way the dwindle works. You can change some of the master stuff And there's more documentation on each of these layouts in the wiki So you can make some changes to how the actual layout works, which is also really nice And if you do have a mouse or a trackpad that allows you to do gestures Hyperland also has support for gestures. I haven't tried these because I don't have A hyperland on a laptop or anything like that. I'm using it at my desktop So I don't know how well those work But the fact that it has those built-in is kind of Amazing considering the fact that this is a window manager not a desktop environment So having gestures of any kind is not something that you normally see in a window manager So those are the positive things that I have to say about it Now I'm sure there are a few other things like there's nothing like it's been very very stable over the course of me actually using this And it's just been a nice experience Outside of the problem me having to find new tools to replace all the tools that I used to use That's not a hyperland problem. That's a wayland problems So if I ignore that part, it's been a very good experience to use once I got it set up and everything Again, most of that's just a wayland problem not a hyperland problem And it's it's been it's just been a good experience So let me talk about a few of the things that I'm going to consider bad. I'm going to quote a quote bad And most of these aren't bad. They're just Signs of a immature window manager. I've put that it put it that way I have a feeling that as the window manager Progresses a little bit these things will get a little bit better And also as wayland becomes more popular in the window manager space this stuff will get better So the first one and the biggest one that I'm going to say is scratch pads now. I'm a big scratch pad Guy like I like scratch pads more than anybody else And I'll fight anyone who claims to have the scratch pad king title. That's me. You can't have it So I like scratch pads a lot on q-tile. I have 12 different scratch pads for different things I use them all and it's fantastic I have key bindings for all those things like I can hit super v and bring up pulse mixer I can bring up super c to bring up ranger. I can use super shift b to bring up news boat You know, I have super n and super shift n both for separate terminals. I have super m for mpd You get the point, right? I have a ton of scratch pads scratch pads aren't well supported in hyperland yet now they do have The functionality to get there, but it's not quite there yet Now they do a very half-ass job of kind of copying the way i3 does Scratch pads now on i3 the base functionality of scratch pads is that you have a window that's here Right, you have a window that you've you've launched you press a key binding is send it to the scratch pad Workspace, which is hidden and then you can press another key binding that brings it back up, right? That's the way by default scratch pads work in i3. That's the same way they work in hyperland and if you are not a Big scratch pad type person and you just want to have that Minimized space for your Windows or whatever and you want to kind of treating it treat it as minimizing a window That can work for some people, but it's not the way that I use scratch pads I like to launch my applications on startup have them launch inside of the scratch pad workspace And then bring them up with a key binding and then send them back to the workspace when i'm done with them Whatever's in those windows continues to run inside of the invisible workspace. That's the way that I like doing that now hyperland Can do that, but it's hacky You have to use a lot of window rules in order to get those things to work And it's just not as Good as you'd want it to be it's very You know to be honest with you It's very very close in that aspect to i3 Because in i3 you also have to have a lot of rules in order to set up Scratch pads is the way you want them to work It's definitely not as good as the scratch pad functionality on q-tile Which is built in and works really well just with a couple lines of of syntax So scratch pads are a space where hyperland really needs to Get better And the thing is is that even if you were to use the built-in functionality for scratch pads on a hyperland You can still only have one scratch pad now. I am very odd I don't i'm one of the few people probably that require Massive amounts of scratch pads. So the developers probably aren't going to try to Do the thing that I want them to do and have multiple scratch pads But I would really like them to have more than one the ability to have as many as you want would be really cool So scratch pads definitely do need to be something that works right now I have this set up right here. And this is tile x and tile x is fine It doesn't always do The thing that you want it to do So if you don't if I don't have the cursor in the middle of the screen like just saved over here You can see that the focus is actually on the window behind it And if I go to start typing i'm technically typing over there in that other one and sometimes they don't notice, right? Well, I don't notice until I you know See that i'm not getting the text in the right place So I then have to you know move the cursor or I have to do the key binding to move focus And then I can start using this the tile x also tile x is not native to Wayland You have to have a Environment variable in order to get it to run especially well, that's not 100% true. You can use it in regular mode just fine But it does not like the quake mode, which is what i'm using here in order to get you know without doing the environment variable thing so Uh scratch pads is probably the number one thing that i'm Missing when it comes to hyperland the second thing that's not so good And this is less of a hyperland thing is the bar now you guys can see up here at the top I have a bar. This is way bar and uh, I will be making a separate video on way bar I don't have many many positive things to say about it. So I don't even know if that Video will ever come to be honest with you. I don't like to do videos where completely negative Even though I just did one on Wayland, which is mostly completely negative But even then I was positive about some things, right? I changed my mind over being ready for regular people So I was somewhat positive there. I don't have a lot of positive things to say about way bar Hyperland by itself does not come with a bar and that's not unusual There's a lot of window managers out there on both sides of the xorg Wayland divide that don't come with bars and that's fine But the thing is that on xorg when you have a window manager that doesn't come with a bar You have a lot of options, right? You have a lot of different bars that you can use you can use poly bar tint To you can use e w w you can use Bumblebee bar you can use lemon bar you can use any number of different bars out there And you know just you're spoiled for choice on the Wayland side. That's not the case, right? There are a few bars That you can use way bar is the by far the most popular by far the most polished Experience that you're going to have in terms of bars And that's saying something considering that it's not that polished. It's okay It feels like they were trying to do The poly bar thing, but they didn't quite have the They didn't quite want to rip it off completely So they decided to do their configuration like if I go if I show you this this is the way bar configuration file and the It's like I said, it's kind of got the whole Poly bar syntax, but they've put it instead of a json folder or They've put it instead of a json, you know syntax and it's not great because you have to have quotation marks and you have to have the The commas in the right place and stuff like that. So it's it's not the greatest Reimplementation of poly bar ever. I don't hate json as much as I hate yaml, but it's pretty close It just makes it it makes a lot more messy, right? Because the whole thing has to be inside of a bracket You have to have all these quotation marks all over the place if they could figure out a way to have their Configuration file without all of that stuff They'd have a very good implementation of poly bar honestly because it's kind of the same But it's also like I said, it's just a little bit more messy than I'd prefer Also, the documentation is hit or miss when it comes to the modules and stuff. So way bar not fantastic The problem is is that it's the best choice EWW is it's confusing af. It really is I've tried it before I did the live stream on it And I've never got it all the way running I got close But I didn't get all the way there and that was tinkering with it for two hours Maybe I'll probably look at it again, but we'll see There are a few other smaller bars out there, but they're not as well developed They're mostly brand new and they're just not full feature yet So when it comes to bars on a Wayland compositor specifically on hyperland this time You just don't have a lot of choice and that's Not great It's just it's not a great experience right now yet Whereas like I have you're on xorg you have a ton of choice on Wayland compositors and things like hyperland You just don't have as much choice as I'd like now I think like I said earlier As Wayland and hyperland get more mature this problem is probably going to go away because we'll see more bars We'll see more bars that work across Wayland uh compositors and it will just get better over time. We're just not there yet Oh, there was one other thing that I want to talk about before we One more negative thing that I need to talk about and this is uh See the thing about this is that it's not even a Wayland specific problem like for whatever reason monitors Timing out and going blank and then turning off and going to sleep is a problem on xorg. It's a problem on Wayland It doesn't work out. Well, it's just not great on hyperland specifically. They don't have a tool as far as I'm aware For making your screens go blank. They do have a command that will do it Uh d dpms or whatever off and dpms on will work But then you'd have to write a script in order to get that work and it didn't work that well for me It actually ended up turning this monitor off completely and then it would not turn back on which is An interesting thing and then I was able to use sway lock No, no, excuse me I was able to use sway idle in order to get my screens to go blank But it would only turn off one One monitor it turned off this monitor I was able to then move the mouse in order to get the monitor to come back on but it switched positions Right. So uh instead of having this monitor here the big monitor being the the primary monitor is switched to this one It wasn't great, right? So Monitor management income when it comes to hyperland definitely needs to be better Uh in order for me to actually use it full time because as as it is right now I hate to have my monitors on all the time and yes, I can reach around and press the button I'm not that lazy, but it's I much rather have them go to sleep themselves because the computer is on all day And it just be easier if it was automated, right? So that's another negative thing that I really really needs to get fixed So my overall thoughts, like I said pretty positive now that I've been able to use it Now that I've been able to get obs to actually up and running And outside of the whole having to rebuild all of my tools that I use all the time because they all work on x work And not on wayland the actual experience of hyperland has been pretty good And the question then becomes am I going to continue to use it? Yeah, I probably will For a little while I'm going to try to get pie wall up and running and see if that will actually work because that could be fun to have Up and running because I don't have a lot of like on q-tile. I have a whole bunch of themes ready to go I don't have that on on hyperland yet So I'm going to set up pie wall and see if that's fun to play around with if I can get the monitors to go to Sleep I'm much more likely to stay on hyperland Then not if I can't get the monitors to go to sleep I'll probably hightail it back to q-tile Just because I know everything works over there and that means taking off all the wayland specific stuff that I've been Forced to set up in order to get you know obs to work in order to get crusaded to work and all this stuff So that'll be a process So I won't be switching back and forth if I have to leave hyperland to go back to quite q-tile It's probably be the end of my hyperland experience So that's it for this video if you have thoughts on hyperland you can leave those in the comment section below I'd love to hear from you. You can follow me on masses on odyssey those links to be in the video description You can support me on patreon at patreon.com slash the linux cast I'll links for the bear pay and youtube will be in the video description as well if you'd like to support me there Thanks everybody for watching Thanks everybody who does support me on patreon youtube you guys are all absolutely amazing without you the channel There's not me anywhere near where it is right now. So thank you very much for your support I truly do appreciate it. You guys like said completely awesome Mind blown every time I think about how many of you support me. Thank you so much for your support Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time