From Chaos to Custom — My Hyprland Journey

When I first booted into HyDE + Hyprland, I had no clue how deep the rabbit hole went.
Everything looked barebones. No panels, no menus, no polish. Just a tiling compositor staring back at me.

I wanted to daily-drive it, but at the start it was a mess. Configs breaking, keybinds missing, windows tiling in ways I didn’t understand. It felt like living in a half-finished house.

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Hunting for Dotfiles

That’s when I did what every Hyprland beginner does—stole dotfiles.

• Picked up some configs from my senior Biijesh.
• Borrowed pieces from Caelestia dot.
• Dug through Gaurav’s simple-hyprland setup.
• Glued it all together with random snippets from GitHub and Reddit.

Every import broke something new. Wrong paths, weird dependencies, mismatched versions. But that’s how I learned. Each config line was a lesson in how Hyprland ticks.

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Building My Own Setup

Slowly, I stopped just copying. I started shaping.

• Waybar for the status bar.
• Wlogout for session management.
• swww and mpvpaper for wallpapers.
• Swaync for notifications.
• Tofi as a fast, minimal launcher.

Piece by piece, I bent Hyprland to my workflow. My desktop stopped feeling like a borrowed skin and started feeling like mine.

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Why It Mattered

Hyprland taught me something Arch once did:

• Copying gets you started. Creating keeps you going.
• Every crash log is a roadmap.

What began as scattered dotfiles turned into my own system. Not perfect, not final, but mine.

In that moment, I wasn’t just using Hyprland.
I was building my own environment on it.