Vaxry's blog

I code, sometimes.

Hyprland - Hypr, but better, and land.

22 VI 2022

2.8k

Haven't written a blogpost in a while, but hey, I'm writing another one now.

If you have absolutely no idea what Hyprland is, I recommend you go and take a look at the repo here.

Hyprland, just like Hypr, started with an idea. The idea was that since Hypr was nearing the point where I was not really recieving any issues, and saw Hypr as basically finished and not needing any more work, and on top of that I wanted to move to Wayland, I decided to try writing a Wayland compositor. I knew it'd be hard, but I thought to myself that it can't be "that bad". Furthermore, I was looking for something to put into my portfolio, something really big.

And thus, after spending a bit of $$ to get an AMD card, (I then sold my GTX 1080Ti, don't worry) I started work on Hyprland.

In the first week or two, I was in a trance. I would commit over 1000 lines of code daily, I don't even know how. At any rate, that quickly slowed down due to both exhaustion and the fact that now the more annoying issues started popping up. Those that I had to think a lot about and not just sit and write code.

One of those was a mysterious issue with the entire compositor crashing on apps opening subsurfaces. Long story short, I couldn't track down the bug due to first of all there being two at once, meaning when i disabled one part of the code Hyprland would still crash, and thus I'd go "oh this part is fine then".

On top of that, the crashes were random segfaults in wlroots, due to me tainting the lists.

Finally, after a week, it turned out to be one typo. One autocomplete fail that I did not notice. Fuck. My. Life.

Anyways, Hyprland is now my biggest project, with a growing and happy community, as I continue on fixing bugs and adding features. It has amassed over 1600 stars and counting.

If you are wondering why Hyprland has gained 1600 stars in 3 months, while for example Wayfire has gained only 1400 in over 6 years, it's because Hyprland aims to provide something not yet available in Wayland. A dynamically tiled experience, with eyecandy. Something that people over on Xorg liked a lot.

You have Sway, river, etc. which are tiled, great and stable, but very lacking in eyecandy.

Then you have Wayfire, very eyecandy-rich, but with bad tiling.

Hyprland provides great tiling and eyecandy, something people have wanted for years.

I hope Hyprland continues to grow as I add more features and patches, but only time will tell...


Questions, comments, mistakes? Ping me a mail at vaxry [at] vaxry.net and I'll get back to ya.