Install / Update / Uninstall

Installing

Before you start

• This only provides user-level customization. You have to set up network, bluetooth, GPU, etc. yourself
• EndeavourOS GNOME is recommended to save you some hassle
  • Other Arch distros will also work great
  • We’re not sure about non-Arch ones
  • It is never necessary to reinstall your system for dotfiles!
• If you only have 8GiB of RAM, you might wanna set up zram (or swap), since compiling Hyprland takes quite a bit of resources.

Automated installation (for Arch distros only)

The recommended method.

Simple as running this one command and following the script’s procedure

bash <(curl -s "https://end-4.github.io/dots-hyprland-wiki/setup.sh")

The above clones the repo to ~/.cache/dots-hyprland by default. You can change this path by specifying it as an argument:

bash <(curl -s "https://end-4.github.io/dots-hyprland-wiki/setup.sh") ~/Downloads/dots-hyprland

Alternative method

Or just clone the repo and run the install script:

t=~/.cache/dots-hyprland   # Let's not trash your home folder
git clone https://github.com/end-4/dots-hyprland.git "$t" --filter=blob:none
"$t"/install.sh

Tip

The script install.sh is idempotent and interactive. You can run it multiple times and choose to only perform certain actions.

For NixOS

• Currently, these dotfiles are not (yet?) offered as a flake.
• Though you can check out end_4’s NixOS flake
  • It includes home-manager config. You wanna check the homes folder.

For OpenSUSE

• See https://github.com/end-4/dots-hyprland/discussions/485

Manual installation (basically any distro)

Note for non-Arch distros

You’ll have to figure out the equivalents of packages from the value of array depends inside those scriptdata/arch-packages/*/PKGBUILD later when you install the dependencies.

• To get info of a package (e.g. what executable(s) it provides), search it on Arch Linux Packages or the AUR.
• If you’ve successfully finished installation on some non-Arch(-based) Linux distro, you’re very welcomed to share the package list (also other steps if needed) in Discussions, and we could automate the installation for it in the future. Thanks!

• Clone and go to directory

  t=~/.cache/dots-hyprland   # Let's not trash your home folder
  git clone https://github.com/end-4/dots-hyprland.git "$t" --filter=blob:none
  cd "$t"

• Get packages: Install all packages listed as the value of array depends inside those scriptdata/arch-packages/*/PKGBUILD. For Arch Linux, just use an AUR helper such as yay.

• Run manual-install-helper.sh to install the rest of the dependencies.

  • You may also instead install suitable alternatives as you’ve found out, but be sure to git checkout to the required commit when installing AGS.

• Add user to video and input group

  sudo usermod -aG video,input "$(whoami)" # if this somehow doesn't work, just replace "$(whoami)" with your username

• Copy .config, .local to your home folder (review before doing this or you might have your own config files undesirably overwritten)

• Get started with these keybinds

  • Ctrl+Super+T to select a wallpaper
  • Super+/ for a list of keybinds. Have fun!

Post installation

Optional stuff

Extra configs

See if you’re interested in anything in the Extras folder.

Media integration with browser

If you want media thumbnail from your browser to be shown, get the “Plasma browser integration” extension.

• For Chromium
• For Firefox

Colorscheme for ZSH

Put this line into your ~/.zshrc to support colorscheme for ZSH:

source ~/.config/zshrc.d/dots-hyprland.zsh

Launching Hyprland

To launch Hyprland, you can use a DM (Display Manager) or just tty.

See Hyprland wiki for details.

Here’re some extra hints.

How to auto-launch Hyprland after logging in on tty1?

For ZSH or BASH, add this line to the bottom of your ~/.zshrc or ~/.bashrc:

source ~/.config/zshrc.d/auto-Hypr.sh

For FISH, add this line to the bottom of your ~/.config/fish/config.fish:

source ~/.config/fish/auto-Hypr.fish

P.S. It’s recommended to disable the DM if you want to launch Hyprland through tty.

I’m a newbie. What is a tty and DM?

Here’s a brief introduction to give you a quick access, though not exactly true.

You may see tty as some “basis” of a Linux system. There’re normally 7 ttys: tty1 to tty7. You may press Ctrl+Alt+F<n> to switch to tty<n>, and type your username and password to log in.

After logging in, you’re able to launch a graphical environment through command, e.g. Hyprland. Actually, most graphical interfaces could be launched only after you login.

But what if we want a graphical interface for the login interface itself?

So, here comes the DM (Display Manager, also called “LM”, i.e. Login Manager).

• Some commonly used DM:
  • sddm: Often used with KDE Plasma.
  • gdm: Often used with Gnome.
• It’s enabled on system level, and launches automatically after system booting (not logging in yet).
  • On a systemd-based distro, the DM is usually enabled as a systemd service. Run the following to see which DM is enabled.

    grep 'ExecStart=' /etc/systemd/system/display-manager.service

    If it returns “No such file or directory”, then no DM is enabled, or this is not a systemd-based distro.
• It provides you with a graphical interface to login and choose the graphical environment (e.g. Hyprland).
  • How does the DM know which graphical environments are available?
    • Normally, it searches the path /usr/share/xsessions for X11 ones, and /usr/share/wayland-sessions for Wayland ones.
    • The desktop files under these directories contain the information of the graphical environments.

Updating

Automatically installed

• cd to the repo directory
• Run git pull to fetch the latest changes.
• Run ./install.sh again
  • Skip the steps you don’t want (especially the rsync ... ones because it will override your files under its target path). Typically you may want the rsync step which involves .config/ags.

Run ./install.sh -h to see more usage.

Manually installed

• cd to the repo directory
• Run git pull to fetch the latest changes.
• Grab files you want. Typically you may want to grab the .config/ags folder.
• Run manual-install-helper.sh to update some of the dependencies.

Use a updater script

The script update-dots.sh provides you with an option to automatically update the dotfiles to the latest, with simple file hashing to figure out the ones modified by the user, so user will be able to choose whether to overwrite them or not.

• This script is not fully tested, use at your own risk.
• If you’re using this script, you should not run git pull because the script already involves (and depends on) upgrading the git repo itself.

Uninstalling

• Manual uninstallation is heavily recommended
• Currently, there’s a script for uninstallation, but it’s far from perfect and is not actively maintained.
• Here goes a long explanation if you care:

The point is that this repo is not a typical “software”, but a set of config, Therefore it’s very hard to make a proper uninstallation script, which should revert all changes made by the installation script.

For example, the installation script will install yay (AUR-helper) for you if you don’t have one. However, what should the uninstallation script do to revert this changes?

• Remove yay or yay-bin? Not proper, because you may already have one of them installed by yourself (NOT by the installation script).
• Even if the installation script had logged the package list installed by the script, it’s still not proper to remove yay or yay-bin when the log showed yay or yay-bin is installed by the script, because the script can’t log its future, and you may have reinstalled yay or yay-bin another day after the installation script finished, thus they are actually not installed by installation script anymore.

In conclusion, it’s nearly not possible to write a proper uninstallation script. You’d better make reverted changes manually as you need.