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Welcome to Alpymist
Alpymist is a desktop on top of Alpine Linux: Hyprland, a tiling window manager on Wayland, with a bar, a menu, a Settings app and a set of tools chosen to work together. It is one desktop, configured once, and it arrives as signed packages rather than as a script that changes your system.
Three ideas run through all of it, and knowing them makes the rest of this manual shorter:
- The keyboard comes first. Everything has a key or can be found by typing a few letters into the menu on Super+Space. The mouse works everywhere too.
- Every setting has three ways in. The Settings app, the
alpymistcommand, and the menu's search all change the same thing. Use whichever is nearest. - Nothing unsafe is on until you turn it on. No automatic login, no passwordless administrator, no service listening on the network. Where a convenience costs some safety, there is a switch for it that says what it gives up.
Alpymist is young. It installs and it runs, and it has rough edges. Where this manual knows of one, it says so.
How to read this manual
Read Getting started and Finding your way around in order. After that, every chapter stands on its own.
- To change something, look in the chapter for that part of the desktop, or in Every setting, which lists them all.
- To learn the keys, see Hotkeys.
- To do it from a terminal, see The command line.
Super is the key with the Windows logo on most keyboards, and Cmd on a Mac's.
If something here is wrong
The manual is written from the same repository as the code, and each page has a link to its source. A correction is a pull request like any other.