Limitations

What the desk does not do, and what to do instead. Grouped by area; where there is a way round, it is given.

Theming

• Most programs take a new palette only in their next window: btop, yazi, imv, GTK and Qt windows, Thunar and its folders, Zen and VSCodium. Restart the program, or in VSCodium run Developer: Reload Window.
• Spotify takes a new palette at its next start, not while it plays. A Spotify update takes the patch away until the next ./setup update, and your user has to be able to write to /opt/spotify. See Applications.
• The login screen does not follow the palette.
• A Discord update that renames its colour variables leaves parts of Vesktop unthemed, with no error.
• VSCodium’s settings are merged once, by the install. After that only the font and the extensions’ colours in them follow, and a key you delete stays deleted. Error Lens and indent-rainbow draw nothing until the folder is trusted.
• Zen’s own theme picker does nothing while the palette is on it, and an empty tab is Firefox’s grey. The way back is under Applications.
• GTK’s dark setting holds only when set inside the session: an install run from a TTY leaves GTK windows light until ./setup defaults runs in Hyprland. The shell’s font setting does not reach them.
• Without qt6ct, Qt windows come up light grey. Qt 5 applications, VLC among them, are not themed.
• Thunar’s path row cannot be painted. The folders land on the nearest of Papirus’s twenty-five colours rather than on the accent, and without Papirus there are no coloured folders.
• yazi’s file icons keep their own colours: a Python file is Python’s blue and yellow under every palette.
• The selected row in btop and yazi is low-contrast in a few palettes, and neovim’s comments are dim on purpose.

The terminal

• Magenta, bright magenta and bright black keep kitty’s own colours: a palette has no source for them.
• The greeting’s scenes play only in kitty, need ImageMagick, and are drawn for a 9 × 20 pixel cell; at another font size their edges go soft. For a few seconds after a palette change, fa can show the old colours.
• btop forgets what you change inside it when you quit.
• A language without a treesitter parser gets fewer colours in neovim. More parsers are compiled when the tree-sitter CLI is installed; it is in the package list. There is no format-on-save, debugger or test runner.
• matrix needs a font with half-width katakana, or its rain is empty boxes.

The island and the bar

• One bar layout for every style and every screen.
• A second screen’s bar has no island and no panels. Its workspace strip shows the same workspaces as the primary’s, and a detail asked for there opens on the primary.
• The glance does not open while a notification or an OSD holds the island.
• The island shows two running things beside the time at most; a third is only in the glance.
• Closing a panel by clicking on a browser or Vesktop window can blank the pointer for a moment.
• One timer at a time, and the timer’s own steppers cannot set seconds; the launcher’s countdown can (!, then 90s).
• The updates module counts and never installs. The packages panel’s Update opens a terminal for that.
• In the overview, two windows of one application with the same title share a thumbnail, and a window with nothing to draw looks like an empty cell.
• The Claude module reads Claude Code’s own login and sends one small request every ten minutes to read the account’s usage. Without that login it shows counts only.

Notifications

• No action buttons and no inline reply.
• The history is lost when the shell restarts.

Network and Bluetooth

• Wi-Fi cannot forget a network from the shell. Use nmcli connection delete "<name>".
• Bluetooth connects but cannot pair. Pair a new device with bluetoothctl.
• A Wi-Fi password is passed to nmcli on the command line, where other programs running as you can read it for the seconds a connection takes.

Displays

• No bit depth setting.
• Mirroring is every screen copying the primary, not one chosen screen copying another.
• The Displays page does not see changes made elsewhere while it is open. Close it and open it again.
• A set of screens nobody has arranged is left to Hyprland’s automatic layout.
• After a screen is unplugged and plugged back in, its workspaces come back to the primary screen, not to the screen they were on.
• A lid already shut when the session starts is not known to the shell.

The desktop

• Widgets live on the primary screen only.
• No stacking and no auto-arrange: the grid fills from the top left, and what you place stays where it is.
• Arranging has no key. Right-click the wallpaper or a widget, or start it from Settings.
• A floating dock draws over the bottom row of widgets, unless it reserves its space.
• A photo holds one picture, as a path: no album, nothing dropped on it from a file manager, and a picture moved on disk leaves it empty. Its picker has no typed path and no search, and lists PNG, JPEG, WebP and BMP only.

Notes and tasks

• Notes have no search, no export, no pictures and no links, and no undo beyond the archive. Delete asks nothing.
• One deck per screen edge, and none along the top, which is the bar’s. Past a screen’s worth of tabs, the rest are off the end.
• Tasks have no recurrence, no time of day and no reminder, one board, and three fixed lanes.
• Days are read in English and Spanish only.
• Nothing syncs: the tasks are a file on this machine.

The launcher and the clipboard

• No fuzzy matching.
• The ranking counts only what you launch from the launcher, so a program you always open from the dock or a terminal never rises.
• Enter copies from the clipboard history and does not paste. Paste with CTRL V.
• Only the regular clipboard is kept, never the middle-click selection, and nothing is kept while the shell is not running.

Captures and recordings

• One screen, and the compositor picks which.
• No delay, no pointer in the picture, no scrolling capture, and nothing kept of what was taken: no gallery, no undo.
• Window mode offers only the windows on the workspace in view.
• No keyboard way to draw a region; 1 2 3 change the shape and Enter takes what needs no dragging.
• Saving and copying always happen together.
• Without satty there is no annotating, and without tesseract no reading text.
• Captures land in XDG_SCREENSHOTS_DIR when user-dirs.dirs names one, and in a Screenshots folder inside your pictures folder when it does not. Recordings the same, with XDG_SCREENCASTS_DIR and Screencasts.
• The recorder is one take at a time, with no pause, no countdown and no trimming. Sound is the machine’s output or nothing, never the microphone. It writes mp4 only, with no GIF, and without wf-recorder or wl-screenrec it is not on the bar.

The dock

• The same items on every screen.
• Its menu has no keyboard. A click elsewhere closes it.
• Closing an application closes its windows one by one, without asking.
• Two windows of one program can show as two icons if they report different classes.

The control centre

• Tiles are ordered only on the settings page, not by dragging them.
• The colour picker needs hyprpicker, copies a hex and only a hex, and keeps no history.

The night light and leaving it alone

• The night light needs hyprsunset and is a switch: no schedule, one temperature for every screen. It gives way if another program already holds the screen’s colour.
• Three waits: lock, screen off, sleep, in whole minutes up to sixty. No dimming before them, and nothing different on battery.

Games

• No gamepad.
• A game pauses only when the panel closes, not when the pointer leaves.
• Solitaire has no drag, no undo and no draw-three.

Keys, settings and profiles

• Changing a key, Reset and switching profile all reload Hyprland, so anything you set by hand with hyprctl is lost.
• The mouse’s drag, resize and wheel cannot be changed on the Keys page.
• No key has a default to go back to; Reset puts back everything.
• The layout picker cannot set a variant.
• Changing the bar’s height re-tiles every window.
• The power button works only while the shell runs, and does nothing at the login screen. Some laptops never report a short press; use SUPER X or CTRL ALT Delete.
• The key sheet lists only keys with a description.
• Profiles switch only from Settings → System. An export carries the wallpaper’s path, not the picture. The profiles that ship are laid out for a 1920 × 1200 screen, and a smaller one fits fewer widgets.
• To back up the profile in use, export it: the list of profiles holds an old copy of it until you switch away.

The plugins and the pointer

• Shake to find and the glass are Hyprland plugins built for the Hyprland that is running. After a Hyprland update they are gone until you run hyprpm update, or ./setup plugins.
• The glass shows only through translucent windows, which in practice means the terminal.
• Until the vector cursor is built, the pointer is a small picture that pixelates when it grows. install builds it; without the network, run ./setup cursors later.
• Applications that draw their own pointer, Electron and XWayland ones, show their own, uncoloured and unmagnified.

The login screen

• One screen: the primary.
• sddm is enabled only where no display manager was, and only from the next boot: a machine that starts another one keeps it.
• The battery ring reads only BAT0, BAT1 or BAT2.
• The account and session lists work with the pointer only.
• No on-screen keyboard and no accessibility aids.

The packages panel

• Search is by name only.
• Updates are all or nothing, as Arch expects.
• AUR packages need yay or paru.
• Installs and removals open in kitty, and a package installed elsewhere while the panel is open shows when it is opened again.

The appearance panel

• No search and no jump by letter through the wallpapers: Home, End and the page keys are what there is.
• The transition tiles are close to awww’s effects, not exact copies.