man i missed tiling WMs...decided to give hyprland a try after 10 years a faithful GNOME user (i was an AwesomeWM diehard before that). GNOME has treated me very well, but i did miss getting to meticulously customize every last detail of my desktop experience, from individual shortcut keys for moving and resizing windows to things like the border radius and gaps around tiled windows.
i gave swaywm a try a few years ago and deemed it not quite ready for prime-time, and while im sure it's caught up since then, i opted for hyprland this time since it seems popular with tiling WM people these days and i like its simple json-and-css configuration. the background blur is a neat trick, i feel like a Compiz user in 2008 again!
my config isnt really anything special: color schemes are all stolen from Dracula, the panel waybar with a couple plugins and the hyprland-autoname-workspaces daemon to get the little icons in my workspace widget. i use fuzzel as my launcher and one the several wofi forks for notifications. the font is called Iosevka.
for standalone wms the initial setup is bound to be a lot more time-consuming than a DE like GNOME, i had to configure logind for sleep, explicitly setup the volume control panel widget and set global keybinds for my media keys, on top of having to pick from a list of seemingly nearly-identical programs for notifications, launching and panels...honestly pretty annoying from the point of view of a spoiled GNOME user, but to me it's also a throwback, reminds me of when i was just a baby hacker setting up gentoo on my thinkpad t60, except way less janky, particularly when it comes to tablestakes programmer-job tasks like screen sharing, which used to take herculean effort to get to work but now works pretty much out of the box provided you have the right couple of packages installed. crazy how far we've come.
an aside about the gaps: i remember when tiling wms with gaps first became a thing, every linux dork was running dwm with the sought-after gaps patch, or the i3-gaps a bit later...at the time i was "ideologically opposed" to them because my main reason for using a tiling wm back then was to save on screen real estate, so the idea of wasting 10-20px for aesthetic purposes upset me! of course, this was reasonable in the age of 1366x768 resolutions, but these days im not sure it still makes sense as a hill to die on...i like the little gaps.
this setup is on the non-work computer i tend to use the most -- i have it hooked up to my living room tv. next i'll try setting this up on a laptop, which should be interesting.
