hyprland window groups

tl; dr: I was trying to find a way to do stacks but found tabs instead. There’s a dispatcher that will toggle the current window into or out of a group of tabbed windows.

When I was using Zellij, I really liked the stacked view. It was a sort of master layout where the main content is on one side, and an alternate thing is on the other side, and then everything else becomes a shaded window above or below the alternate content, vertically stacked. I was hoping to be able to find that for Hyprland, the compositor or window manager I use on my Asahi Linux box.

I didn’t exactly find it

I did find a plugin that should be able to do it, but I was having trouble getting the plugin manager for Hyprland to fetch the source for Hyprland so it would have the headers it needed to compile.

Instead of that, I played around with window groups in Hyprland. Window groups make it possible to tab a bunch of windows together in a group, but the documentation wasn’t great. Or I was reading in the wrong places. Eventually I pieced together some key bindings and figured out how to make it somewhat useful. I don’t know if I will keep it, but what follows is the setup I’ve added to my hyprland.conf file and a description of how it works.

plugin

Groups/Tabs vs Stacks

Tabs are kind of like stacks, but they’re horizontal instead of vertical. I prefer stacks over tabs because the position of the content below its title is more obvious and reinforced spatially which if I feel reduces cognitive load. Or at least, it’s more visually obvious which one I’m looking at without a need to resort to hacks that destroy readability like fading the inactive window.

Key bindings

I bound this to Mod + g (aka win + g since my $mainMod is super):

bind = $mainMod, g, togglegroup

If you toggle the group on the original window used to make the group, it disbands the group, but I wanted a means of ejecting just one window, so I bound that to Mod + e.

bind = $mainMod, e, moveoutofgroup

I use Mod + [ and Mod + ] to move left or right by a desk, and I use alt + [ and alt + ] to move left or right a window in tmux, so I wanted to use curly braces to move left or right by a tab in the window group:

bind = $mainMod SHIFT, bracketright, changegroupactive, f
bind = $mainMod SHIFT, bracketleft, changegroupactive, b

Using it

The workflow is like this:

launch something

toggle a group

launch more stuff to add it to the group as a tab

Now every new thing lands in the group as a new tab. There’s no key binding to stop adding things to the group, but it’s easy enough to work around:

launch something

eject it from the group

launch more stuff

When the group has focus, new windows will be captured by the group. That is, every new window becomes a tab in the group. Ejecting something from the group takes focus off the group and puts it on that new thing outside of the group, so newly launched things will no longer be captured and become tabs in the group.

To resume adding tabs to the group, just switch focus to the group before launching something.

This might be convenient for keeping all the windows a program that spawns too many windows together. Or even just temporarily grouping them so they can be shoved off to a different desk.

Unexpected bonus

Having a single group as the only thing a single desk will show tabs along the top, but toggling into full screen will hide the tabs. For some reason I like this in window groups, but hate this in Qutebrowser. It reminds me of the monocle mode from BSPWM where I’d let a Polybar display across the top and then toggle into full screen to reclaim the space.

Issues

Unreadable by default

The colors are pretty terrible and because of the display resolution the font is too small for me to read, but windows don’t usually have titles anyway, so maybe that wont matter.

Here’s a screenshot to demonstrate the readability issue.

Better Colors

Update: I found the section in the online wiki and have added color settings for the groups.

I put the following in my hyprland.conf at the top level:

group {
    col.border_active = rgba(303446ee) rgba(303446ee) 45deg
    col.border_inactive = rgba(595959aa)
    groupbar { # essentially the titlebar for the group
        col.active = rgba(303446ee) rgba(303446ee) 45deg
        col.inactive = rgba(595959aa)
    }
}

And I replaced the col.active_border in the general section with:

    col.active_border = rgba(303446ee) rgba(303446ee) 45deg

A new screenshot to demonstrate better colors.

Now I just need to find out where that inner border comes from.

Adding Windows to existing Groups

I haven’t found an easy way to move a window into a group, other than dragging the mouse around like some kind of pre-tiling caveman, then holding shift before release the window on an existing group.

I do like that it wont create a group on shift dropping a window unless the target is already a group, less chance of me clumsily dropping a window and creating a group by mistake.

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