The desktop

Screens

Plug in a screen and it is used: placed to the right of what is there, at its own best resolution. Arrange it once, and Alpymist remembers that arrangement for that set of screens. The desk's dock, the meeting room's projector and the laptop alone each come back as you left them.

Arranging screens

Settings › Displays draws the screens to scale.

• Drag a screen to where it stands on your desk. It lands against the nearest edge of another, so there are no gaps and no overlaps.
• With the keyboard, the arrows move the chosen screen beside another, and Shift and the arrows slide it along that edge a little at a time, for a screen that sits lower than its neighbour.
• Identify puts each screen's number on it.

Below the picture are the chosen screen's own settings:

Nothing changes until Apply. The page then asks whether to keep the layout, and if nobody answers in 15 seconds it puts the previous one back, so a resolution the screen cannot show never leaves you without a picture.

Workspaces on each screen

Each screen has its own workspaces 1 to 9. Super+1 to 9 switch between the workspaces of the screen the pointer is on, and each screen's bar shows its own.

Super+Shift and an arrow move the window with the focus that way among the others, and from the edge of a screen on to the screen on that side, onto the workspace it is showing. An account made before these keys is given them the next time either setting below is changed, unless it already uses one of the four for something else. One given them when they only took a window to another screen has them put right when it next logs in.

Super+Alt and an arrow take the window straight to the screen on that side, floating or not, in one press, however many windows are between it and the edge. Every account has these from the package.

Super+Tab shows the nine workspaces of the screen the pointer is on, on that screen; move the pointer to another screen and press it again for that one's. Click a workspace to go to it, or press Super and its number. An account made before the key is given it at its next login, or at the upgrade, unless it already uses Super+Tab; hyprland.conf as it was is kept beside it as hyprland.conf.bak-overview, and a line taken out again stays out. The overview is loaded when the desktop starts, so the first time after the upgrade that brought it, log out and in.

On Intel and AMD processors the overview is Hyprland's own, which shows the windows themselves. Everywhere else, an ARM machine or a virtual one on a Mac among them, it is Alpymist's: each window is an outline with its program's name, where it is on the screen. There Tab, Shift+Tab and the arrows move between the workspaces, and so does Tab with Super still held; Enter or a click goes to the one marked, 1 to 9 go straight to one, and Esc closes it. Nothing else takes it away: not a second Super+Tab, and not a click that missed.

When a screen goes away its workspaces move to the screens that are left, and when it comes back they go home.

Each screen has its own workspaces, on that page, turns this off: then there is one set of nine shared by every screen, as Hyprland has it.

The lid

With another screen on, closing a laptop's lid turns its own screen off and moves what was on it to the others; opening it puts everything back. Turn the laptop's screen off when the lid closes is the switch for that.

What the lid does to the machine, suspend or nothing, is a separate setting in Power, and with a screen connected it is nothing by default, so a docked laptop keeps running when closed.

The login screen follows the lid too: with the lid closed it appears on the external screen.

From the command line

alpymist displays list
alpymist displays set DP-3 --mode 1920x1080@60 --position 1920,0
alpymist displays set S24E650 --scale 1.25 --rotate 90
alpymist displays set HDMI-A-1 --mirror eDP-1
alpymist displays set HDMI-A-1 --mirror none
alpymist displays set DP-5 --on false
alpymist displays save      # remember the screens as they are now
alpymist displays apply     # put the remembered layout in place
alpymist displays forget    # forget it: the screens are extended again
alpymist displays overview  # what Super+Tab does

A screen is named by its connector, as list shows it, or by part of its model name. Layouts are kept by make, model and serial number, so a screen keeps its place whichever port it is plugged into.

Where it is kept

Layouts are in ~/.config/alpymist/displays.toml. From them Alpymist writes Hyprland monitor rules to ~/.config/alpymist/hypr/displays.conf, which is rewritten whenever the screens change: change a layout with Settings or alpymist displays, not by editing that file. A monitor = line in your own hyprland.conf still applies to a screen Alpymist's rules do not name.

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