Well the past week has been quite a ride. I started with bone stock i3 without even so much as a wallpaper; And ended up in Wayland using the Hyprland compositor. What i discovered along the way has changed my workflow entirely… for the better i hope. I hope to cover both the benefits of my current setup, as well as some pretty nifty tricks I picked up along the way.

My current setup⌗

Screenshot I’m sure I’ll have some related dotfiles put on here somewhere in case someone wanted to replicate parts of that. Though it’s a pretty minimal setup compared to many out there.

Benefits⌗

  1. Working with hyprland was dead simple, and getting it to do what I wanted was very straight forward.
  2. Well… I think it looks pretty good.
  3. It’s just fun to work with.

I was able to duplicate keybindings to be mostly compliant to the standard i3 keybindings I’m used to. I even got window management to kind of just work the way I want it to. With very little effort to get tabs and such working.

Useful applications I picked up along the way⌗

Basically through getting past my ‘good enuf’ mentality I was able to Find a lot of handy tools, and applications that my luddite mind would have never allowed for in the past.

  • exa - A modern, colorized, file lister as they call it.
  • cider - Apple music player. Didn’t know I needed this, but I do.
  • kitty - Quick GPU accelerated terminal emulator with ligerature, and native image support just to name a few pretty nifty features.
  • sxiv - Lightweight image viewer with a pretty neat thumbnail mode. I couldn’t believe I’d never searched for something like this before, but I found myself needing something like this and it worked terrifically. (Definitely try the -t / thumbnail mode if you try it)
  • fish - Yeah so I switched to fish for the moment. I like the completion though I’m unsure how i feel about the non-POSIX compliance.
  • Oh-My-Fish - A plugin/theme framework for fish. Pretty good. No reason not to use it really.

tl;dr⌗

Basically I went down a ricing rabbit hole. I found a bunch of new applications despite myself; And I feel like it’s made my work/life a lot easier.