In this post I will update my journey of moving from X11 to wayland. Currently I am running bspwm with polybar and everything works really well. It’s fairly minimalistic and very performant.

Several distributions are shipping with wayland instead of X11 such as Debian, Fedora, Manjaro and Ubuntu. Some time ago there were not many choices for tiling window managers, though Sway was one of the first. Now we have more choices and one that interests me the most is hyprland. To replace polybar I will use waybar.

Installing the packages is simple

pacman -S hyprland
pacman -S waybar

Lockscreen

In X11 betterlockscreen is a great looking lockscreen and works well with xidlelock, as an alternative for wayland I’ll be using swaylock(-effects) and swayidle.

sxhkd replacement

With hyprland you don’t need a different tool for shortcuts, it’s baked in. The nice thing in sxhkd were the keychord, this can be achieved in hyprland using submaps.

Clipboard

Instead of xclip wayland has wl-clipboard.

Lockscreen and idle

For the lockscreen you can use swaylock and for idle timeout there is swayidle.

Wallpaper

hyprpaper

Screenshot

grim together with slurp to select areas of the screen.

Application launcher

Walker instead of rofi. There are also builds of rofi compatible with wayland. But personally Walker is nice application launcher.

Configuration

You can create configs in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME or ~/.config/.

Hyprland

https://wiki.hyprland.org/Configuring/Configuring-Hyprland/

Hyprpaper

https://github.com/hyprwm/hyprpaper

~/.config/hypr/hyprpaper.conf

Waybar

https://github.com/Alexays/Waybar/wiki/Configuration

~/.config/waybar/config

preload = /path/to/image.png
#if more than one preload is desired then continue to preload other backgrounds
preload = /path/to/next_image.png
# .. more preloads

#set the default wallpaper(s) seen on inital workspace(s) --depending on the number of monitors used
wallpaper = monitor1,/path/to/image.png
#if more than one monitor in use, can load a 2nd image
wallpaper = monitor2,/path/to/next_image.png
# .. more monitors

Swaylock-effects

$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/swaylock/config

Swayidle

$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/swayidle/config

timeout 300 'swaylock'
timeout 600 'hyprctl dispatch dpms off' resume 'hyprctl dispatch dpms on'
before-sleep swaylock

This config sets an timeout for 300 seconds which then activates swaylock. After 600 seconds it turns off the screen, if one were to resume it turns the screen back on. Finally before suspending, swaylock is always activated.

Neat to have in hyprland

Changing capslock to control and setting autorepeat rate is much easier. This can be set directly in the hyprland config.

input {
    kb_options = ctrl:nocaps
    repeat_rate = 50
    repeat_delay = 200
}

Before you would have to add a keyboard-layout.conf file in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d

Section "InputClass"
    Identifier       "keyboard_layout"
    MatchIsKeyboard  "on"
    Option           "XkbLayout"  "us"
    Option           "XkbOptions" "ctrl:nocaps"
    Option           "AutoRepeat" "200 10"
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