HyDE without the clutter. Hyprland on Arch Linux, two hand-made Quickshell shells and one colour pipeline, installed with one command.

Install · What you get · Colour · Build your own bar · Contributing

Note

hyde-lite is a fork of HyDE, the Hyprland desktop by the HyDE Project and its contributors, which itself continues hyprdots. It is cut down to what a Quickshell desktop needs and extended with its own shells. It is an independent project, not affiliated with or endorsed by HyDE, and it keeps HyDE's GPL-3.0 licence. See Credits and licence.

Why

• Less of everything. One base theme instead of twelve. Waybar, rofi, dunst, swaync and the other programs a shell replaces are not installed. Every difference from upstream is listed in LITE.md, so staying close to HyDE stays possible.
• Two shells, one choice. The Morphing Island: a single pill that expands into the launcher, control centre, notifications, lock screen and more. Or the bar shell: a classic bar made of pills, with ready layouts and an editor. Pick one at install time and switch whenever you like.
• One source of colour. matugen colours everything from the wallpaper: you choose a scheme and a mode (auto, dark or light), and HyDE's own colour flag is written from the same values, so the two never disagree.
• One command. From a barebones Arch Linux to a working desktop, safe to run again.

	HyDE	hyde-lite
Themes	twelve	one base theme (Nordic Blue)
Bar, launcher, notifications, logout	waybar, rofi, dunst, swaync, wlogout	two Quickshell shells
Colour	wallbash, taken from the image	matugen, with HyDE's templates fed from it
Install	HyDE's installer and its questions	./install.sh, no questions

What you get

	Morphing Island	Bar shell
Look	one floating pill per screen that morphs between states	bar of pills, islands or one strip, top or bottom
Launcher, clipboard, calculator, pickers	yes	yes
Control centre, notifications, OSD	yes	yes
Workspace overview and notepad	yes	no
Screenshots	with Copy, Save, Edit and Delete	HyDE's screenshot tool
Lock screen and login screen	yes, the island's own	the same ones, with a fade instead of the pill
Layouts and editor	one fixed design	seven layouts, a layout file and an in-shell editor

Everything in one strip	Workspaces, clock and status in separate pills
Launcher (Super+A)	Control centre (Super+Alt+C)
Workspace overview (Super+D)	Lock screen (Super+L)

Both UIs are written in QML on Quickshell and are one configuration, Configs/.config/quickshell: the island in island/, the bar in bar/, and shell.qml loads the one that is active. Only one runs at a time.

Requirements

• Arch Linux (or a derivative with pacman), freshly installed or not, with a normal user that has sudo.
• An internet connection. The installer fetches packages with pacman and the AUR.
• A GPU Hyprland supports. Nvidia needs --nvidia. Nothing else about your hardware is assumed.

Install

On a barebones Arch Linux, as a normal user with sudo and an internet connection:

git clone https://github.com/andyjamesf/hyde-lite
cd hyde-lite
./install.sh

The installer runs HyDE's own installer in separate steps (packages, configs and themes, login screen and shell, services), installs the fonts the shells need and checks them, and at the very end asks which shell to start with. It carries on when a step fails and prints a summary of what is left to do by hand. Logs go to ~/.local/state/hyde-lite-install/. It is made for a generic PC: it knows none of your apps and assumes no hardware; monitors and GPU are left to Hyprland's detection. Then log out and pick the Hyprland session, or reboot.

Installer options

Option	Effect
--island / --bar	pick the first shell without being asked (without either, it asks at the end; with no terminal it picks the island)
--dry-run	show what would happen, change nothing
--nvidia	also install the Nvidia driver when an Nvidia GPU is found
--shell zsh|fish	login shell to set up (default zsh)
--aur-helper NAME	AUR helper to build (default yay-bin)
--no-services	do not enable system services
--interactive	let HyDE's installer ask its questions

Updating

hyde-lite update brings the installed system up to date with its checkout:

hyde-lite update              # pull (fast-forward only), run the installer again, say what to reload
hyde-lite update --check      # only say whether there is something to install
hyde-lite update --restart    # also reload Hyprland and restart the shell when the update changed them

It lists the new commits, pulls main, runs ./install.sh for the shell you use now (--island or --bar, so the installer does not ask again) and reports what to load afterwards: hyprctl reload if the Hyprland configuration changed, and island off && island on (island) or qs ipc call shell reload (bar) if the shells changed. It asks for sudo once, for packages.

It stops without changing anything when the checkout has changes of its own, is not on main, or has diverged from origin/main. The installer redeploys only the dots whose content changed and does not overwrite what is yours: your hyprland.lua, the settings in bar/config and island/config, prefs.json and your wallpapers. Before it replaces a file it saves the old one under ~/.local/share/deez/backup/. install.sh records the checkout and the last commit it installed completely in ~/.local/state/hyde-lite/, so an update whose installer failed half-way runs again next time even when git has nothing new.

By hand it is git pull --ff-only followed by ./install.sh --island --no-services (or --bar).

In the island, Settings has a "hyde-lite" row: it checks for news when the screen opens (Check does it again) and Update opens a terminal that runs hyde-lite update --restart, where sudo asks for your password. The installer's package step needs sudo, which the island's own password prompt (polkit) does not answer, so the password is typed in that terminal, which also shows the progress and any error. The terminal runs in its own unit, so the shell restart that ends the update does not close it.

Under it, a "System updates" row shows what pacman, the AUR and flatpak have waiting and opens HyDE's own update terminal, which lists them and asks before it updates. It is a separate button on purpose: a system upgrade can need a reboot and can break things, and starting it with the hyde-lite update would make it hard to tell which one did. Note that install.sh, and so hyde-lite update, still begins with pacman -Syu --needed --noconfirm git base-devel, which upgrades the pacman packages without showing the list.

Using it

A few keys to start with (Super is the main modifier; KEYBINDINGS.md has the rest, and Super+\ lists them on screen):

Key	Does
Super+A	launcher (type = for a calculator, : for clipboard history, ? for keybindings)
Super+L	lock the screen
Super+Alt+C	control centre
Super+D	workspace overview (island)
Super+Shift+W / Super+Shift+T	wallpaper and theme pickers
Super+Shift+C	colour scheme of the current wallpaper
Super+Shift+D	light, dark or auto
Super+Alt+I	switch between the island and the bar shell

Colour

wallpaper-palette list|set|next|prev chooses among the schemes matugen offers for the current wallpaper; wallpaper-library next|prev|random walks the whole wallpaper collection (a small starter set is copied to ~/Pictures/Wallpapers on first install: pixel-art night cityscapes, see Wallpapers/SOURCES.md). One change recolours the shell, the terminal, GTK and the rest of HyDE's templates; the slow template rebuild runs in the background.

Wallpapers of installed HyDE themes show up in that folder as links; wallpaper-library --own turns them into files of the folder (hard links, no extra space), so they stay if a theme is removed.

The picture Hyprland shows before a wallpaper daemon has started is one of three files of its package; sudo hypr-default-wallpaper install points them at your current wallpaper (and re-does it after each hyprland upgrade), uninstall puts the originals back.

Build your own bar

With the bar UI, a bar is data: zones (left, centre, right) of pills, each pill a list of widgets. Open the editor with qs ipc call bar edit, or write ~/.config/quickshell/layouts.json by hand; the file is validated and reloaded while the shell runs. See docs/bar-builder.md.

Status

Note

hyde-lite is young. The installer has been run twice in a clean Arch container and once in a clean Arch virtual machine (all steps exit 0), with Hyprland, both shells and matugen working, and the repository checks and unit tests (bash tools/check.sh) run on every push by CI.

Not yet seen on a real screen: the bar editor, the lock and login screens with the fade entry, and the installer's shell choice. Real hardware has not been tried. Please open an issue if something breaks on yours; the bug template asks for what is needed.

Contributing

Small, focused changes are welcome. CONTRIBUTING.md explains how to run the checks, what to include in a pull request and the one rule that matters most for a fork: keep the difference from upstream HyDE small, and write it down in LITE.md.

bash tools/check.sh      # shell syntax, Python, TOML/JSON, dots includes, bar layouts, unit tests, qmllint

qmllint needs Qt 6.5 or newer and the quickshell package; without them that step is skipped.

File	What it is
LITE.md	every deviation from upstream HyDE, and why
docs/bar-builder.md	layout schema, widget list, how to add a widget
docs/island-features.md	inventory of the Morphing Island's features
KEYBINDINGS.md	all keybindings
docs/weight.md	what the repository and an install weigh
docs/architecture.md	how the code is layered, where it leaks, what to refactor first
docs/island-builder.md	arranging the island: icon lists, extra pills, the Settings editors
docs/troubleshooting.md	a shell using too much CPU: how to catch it and read its log

Credits and licence

hyde-lite stands on HyDE by the HyDE Project and its contributors, cut at upstream commit aceb94ee, and on hyprdots before it. Like HyDE it is licensed under the GNU GPL v3.0 (LICENSE); keep that file and CREDITS.md when you redistribute it.

• THIRD_PARTY.md lists code from other projects with its own notice and the assets that came with HyDE whose licence is not verified.
• The starter wallpapers, the logo and the banner above are original and released under CC0 1.0 (tools/gen_wallpapers.py, tools/gen_logo.py, tools/gen_banner.py). The banner's text is set in Inter (SIL Open Font Licence 1.1). The screenshots are not covered by that: they show the maintainer's own desktop, with a photograph as the wallpaper.
• hyde-lite is built on Hyprland, Quickshell and matugen.