Tutorial

November 24, 2024 · View on GitHub

hyprscroller is a Hyprland plugin that creates a window layout similar to PaperWM.

Consult the README for more details beyond this quick tutorial.

Rows and Columns

hyprscroller supports multiple workspaces per monitor. Each workspace is a row: a scrollable tiling of columns, where each column may contain one or more windows.

Your workspace is not limited by the size of the monitor; windows will have a standard size and will scroll in and out of the view as they gain or lose focus. This is an important difference with respect to other tiling window managers, you always control the size of your windows, and if they are too big and not in focus, they will just scroll out of view. There are ways to view all windows at the same time, through overview mode, but more on that later.

There are two working modes that can be changed at any time:

row: it is the default. For each new window you open, it creates a new column containing only that window.
column: a new window will be placed in the current column, right below the active window.

If your monitor is in landscape mode (the usual one), you will probably work mostly in row mode. If you are using a monitor in portrait mode, you may prefer column mode. You can configure each monitor independently through available options.

rows-columns.mp4

Window Sizes

There are options to define the default width and height of windows. These sizes are usually a fraction of the available monitor space so it is easier to fit an integer number of windows fully on screen at a time. If you use a regular monitor, you may use fractions like onehalf or onethird to fit 2 or 3 windows. If you have an ultra-wide monitor, you may decide to use onethird, onefourth or onesisxth to fit 3, 4 or 6 windows in the viewport at a time.

There are also complementary fractions like twothirds, threequarters etc., so for example you can fit a onethird and a twothirds window for the full size of the monitor. Depending on the size and resolution of your monitor you can decide which fractions are best suited for you, and configure them through options.

You can toggle different window widths and heights in real-time using cyclesize. It will go through your list of selected fractions defined in the configuration, and resize the active window accordingly.

Of course you can also manually define exactly the size of a window with Hyprland's resizewindow.

If you want to quickly fit a series of windows in a column or columns in a row, you can use fitsize. It will ignore fractions, and re-scale all the affected windows to fit in the screen.

cyclesize-fitview.mp4

Focusing and Alignment

When you change window focus, hyprscroller will always show the active (focused) window on screen, and intelligently try to fit another adjacent window if it can. However, in some cases you may want to decide to align a window manually; alignwindow does exactly that.

alignwindow.mp4

Overview Mode

When you have too many windows in a workspace, it can be hard to know where things are. toggleoverview helps with that by creating a bird's eye view of the whole workspace.

overview-mode.mp4

Jump Mode

Jump mode takes advantage of overview mode to provide a very quick way to focus on any window on your monitors. Similar to vim-easymotion, it overlays a label on each window. Pressing all the numbers of a label, changes focus to the selected window.

Assign a key binding to scroller:jump, for this tutorial:

bind = $mainMod, slash, scroller:jump,

Pressing your mod key and / will show an overview of your windows on each monitor.
Now press the numbers shown on the overlay for the window you want to change focus to.
jump will exit, and the focus will be on the window you selected.

Pinning a Column

Sometimes you want to keep one window static at all times, for example an editor with a file you are working on, while letting other windows scroll in the rest of the available space. These windows may include terminals or documentation browser windows. You can pin a column, and it will stay at its current location until you call pin again. To change the pinned column, call pin twice; once to unpin the currently pinned column, and the second to pin the active one.

pin.mp4

Copying/Pasting (Moving) Windows

To be able to re-organize windows and columns more easily, you can use selectiontoggle to select windows. Those windows can be in any workspace, and can also be selected from overview mode. After you are done with your selection, go to the place where you want to move them (same or different workspace), and call selectionmove. selectionmove needs an argument, right is usually the most intuitive choice, because it will locate the selection right of the active window of the current workspace.

Marks

hyprscroller supports vim-like marks. You can use marks to quickly navigate to frequently used windows, regardless of which workspace they are in. For example, you can assign a key binding to a mark that focuses on your email client. When you invoke marksvisit, hyprscroller will take you to that window, even warping to a different workspace if necessary.

# Create a window rule that assigns mark m to the main Thunderbird window when
# opened
windowrulev2 = plugin:scroller:marksadd m, class:(thunderbird), title:(Mozilla Thunderbird)$

# Create a submap to visit Thunderbird using 'm. You can add more.
bind = $mainMod, apostrophe, submap, marksvisit
submap = marksvisit
bind = , m, scroller:marksvisit, m
bind = , m, submap, reset
bind = , escape, submap, reset
submap = reset

Trails and Trailmarks

Marks are good for quickly moving to some window, but you need to assign a name to each one. Trailmarks are like anonymous marks that live in a list called a trail. You can have as many trailmarks as you want in each trail, and as many trails as you want. To navigate these trailmarks, you navigate the list with previous/next dispatchers.

Read the section of the README for a more detailed explanation, possible key bindings, and how to set IPC events to show trail and trailmark information on your desktop bar.