Hyprland / Waybar Utilities

Github Notifications

For both my personal projects and work, I rely heavily on GitHub notifications—especially when it comes to code reviews. Having quick access to these notifications is essential; otherwise, I’m stuck using the website, which is far less convenient.

Previously, I wrote custom py3status modules for i3 to handle notifications. Now that I’ve switched to Waybar, I realized many of those modules don’t exist… Surprisingly, there wasn’t a GitHub notification plugin or module available for Waybar, something I found hard to believe!

To solve this, I ported my py3status_github_notifications project to Waybar. You can check it out on GitHub: waybar_github_notifications.

Getting started is simple: just clone the repository, add a couple of configuration parameters to your Waybar config, and you’re good to go. The documentation should help you get set up quickly.

~/.config/waybar/config

...
"modules-center": [
  "hyprland/window",
  "cpu",
  "memory",
  "network",
  "custom/gh", // < add it here
...
"custom/gh": {
  "format": "{text}",
  "return-type": "json",
  "exec": "$HOME/.config/waybar/custom_modules/gh_notifications.sh",
  "interval": 300,
  "on-click": "exec xdg-open https://github.com/notifications?query=reason%3Aparticipating",
}
...

Amdfan Monitor

I also maintain Amdfan and py3status_amdfan, which I rely on to keep my fan status visible in my status bar. This is especially useful since I’m often pushing my VRAM to the limit with various machine learning models for experimenting with my Discord bots.

For Waybar, all that’s needed is JSON output from the application. I was able to format it similarly to the old py3status module, so after a quick poetry init/add/install, everything was up and running. You can find the new waybar_amdfan on GitHub. Installation is straightforward—just clone the repository and add a config block.

~/.config/waybar/config

...
"modules-center": [
    "hyprland/window",
    "cpu",
    "memory",
    "network",
    "custom/gh",
    "custom/gh#2",
    "custom/fan_monitor", // < add at some spot
  ],
...
"custom/fan_monitor": {
    "format": "{text}",
    "exec": "$HOME/.config/waybar/waybar_amdfan/waybar_amdfan.sh",
    "restart-interval": 5,
    "return-type": "json",
},
...

Overall I find waybar really easy to work with, and quite similar to py3status, it doesn’t support as many features yet, but it does allow me to write the modules in Python and Bash or really any language, so what it lacks in features, it makes up for in flexibility.

Still need to figure out how to conditionally change the colors that are displayed for my github notifications, but for now I at least have the base functionality covered.

Discord

Finally, Discord. When it came time to play some D&D, I didn’t expect any issues, as Discord had mostly been working fine. However, I hadn’t tried using voice chat or push-to-talk since switching to Hyprland/Wayland.

On Wayland, Discord’s keybinds don’t work because there’s no mechanism for global hotkeys. You either have to use voice activation, a software mute button, an external program to manage keybinds, or run Discord under XWayland.

For now, I chose to run Discord in XWayland, which restores its X11 keybinding functionality. However, this only works when Discord is the focused window. It’s a temporary workaround, and I’ll need to research better solutions. It’s unclear how the Wayland community will address this, as they seem resistant to implementing features needed by many applications. Maybe there’s an easy solution I’ve missed.

To launch Discord under XWayland, use the following command:

ELECTRON_OZONE_PLATFORM_HINT=x11 /usr/bin/discord-canary

This allows Discord to retain some keybinding functionality, but the focus issue remains.

Conclusion

So far so good, only 1 day into Hyprland, but it’s familiar enough, and hopefully some of the issues with apps like discord, and I’m sure as soon as I try to do a screenshare, that it will be a mess, but for now it’s ok.

I’m sure I’ll end up with a pile of hacks and configuration shenans at some point, but I’ll jam it into some dotfiles and go on with my day.

Let me know if you’ve also made the move over to Wayland, and have run into particular issues.