I asked Codex AI to customize my Hyprland desktop – it worked, but beginners beware

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ZDNET’s key takeaways

• Configuring the Hyprland window manager is challenging.
• I wanted to see how well AI would perform at creating a .conf file.
• There’s an important lesson to be learned here.

This is the year I realized how much I enjoy tiling window managers, and Hyprland is my favorite so far.

If you’ve never experienced a tiling window manager, know that they aren’t exactly for the faint of heart. They are driven by keyboard shortcuts, of which there are a lot to memorize. On top of that, most of them require configuration via text files.

Such is the case with Hyprland.

Hyprland is configured via the ~/.config/hyrp/hyrpland.conf file; for the uninitiated, it can be rather daunting. You really should know what you’re getting into before you make that first edit to the file.

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I’ve done a bit of Hyprland dotfile ricing (a fancy way of saying I’ve spent time customizing hyprland.conf files), but I decided to run a little experiment.

I wanted to see if AI could create a hyperland.conf file based on my prompt. I decided to start fresh with a CachyOS installation. (I selected both the Hyrpland and KDE Plasma desktops — why I added both will become clear shortly.) Once I had CachyOS up and running, I started the process. I decided to try three different AI tools: Opera’s Aria, Ollama, and Codex.

Of the three AI tools, Codex was the only one capable of creating a remotely usable configuration. Here’s how it went.

The prompt

To create the customization, I used the following prompt:

Create a hyprland.conf configuration file for Hyprland version 0.55.2 that uses Waybar with a glassy, rounded-corner theme, a color palette of purple and pink, and uses the following keybindings: Super+t to open the terminal, Super+b to open the web browser, and the default keybindings for moving windows and window focus.

Upon running the query, every AI service I used informed me that many configuration options would be placeholders and that I would need to customize them to fit my needs.

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It took a few tries, but eventually Codex gave me this .conf file, which you can view in my GitHub repository.

I had my doubts that it would work. Even so, I added the contents from Codex and reloaded the window manager with:

hyprctl reload

I was not surprised to encounter numerous errors. I’d spotted some of the errors even before I copied the output to the .conf file, but wanted to see what happened regardless.

Here are the problems I found at first glance:

• There was no default terminal set.
• The border_radius option no longer works in 0.55.2.
• In the rounding = 12px option, the px would cause an error, so it had to be removed.
• Windowrule does not work.

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I also had to install the following to make this work:

• kitty terminal app
• Waybar
• rofi

Without the above installed, Hyprland wouldn’t be very functional.

After resolving the above issues, I was surprised that the .conf file worked. It wasn’t a very elegant desktop, nor did it apply the color scheme I added in my query, but I had a skeleton .conf file I could use to further tweak.

Why did I install KDE Plasma?

When I first set out to do this, I only installed Hyprland on CachyOS. After adding the contents to the config file as-is (because I wanted to see how it worked), I wound up with what was essentially a non-functioning desktop. The main reason for this is that kitty, Waybar, and Rofi were not installed.

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I installed CachyOS a second time, only with KDE Plasma along for the ride. With KDE Plasma added, I knew I had a backup desktop environment to use, should things go awry. All I had to do was reboot CachyOS, log into KDE Plasma, and fix the issues.

Once I had all of the issues fixed within the Codex-derived .conf file, Hyprland worked as expected. Of course, there were a lot of tweaks that needed to be taken care of to get it exactly how I wanted it to look, 

A lesson learned

I was fairly certain how this experiment would turn out, and it solidified my opinion that AI is often wrong but can at least serve as a launching point. Even though I explained to Codex (the only AI to come close to creating a functioning hyprland.conf file) which version of Hyprland I was using, it still used options that are no longer viable.

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To those who might be interested in migrating to the Linux operating system, I first want to say that Hyprland is not the window manager for you. Stick with KDE Plasma, Cinnamon, or GNOME. For those who want to try and use Hyprland (or any tiling window manager configured with a text file), consider AI to be a means to see how the configuration files work, but make sure to learn from what AI presents to you, so you can understand how it works and can start creating files on your own.

Think of AI as nothing more than a means to take your first steps, but know that you will have to correct its mistakes.