Settings

Settings is the one panel that is not the island: an ordinary window, moved and closed like any other, where an option that is a shape is drawn as the thing it changes.

Opening it

SUPER ,
The right button on the wallpaper → Settings
The Settings door on the control centre’s top row
> in the launcher, which lists the shell’s own places

Opening it closes whatever the island had open. Search settings, at the top of the sidebar, finds a page by its name, its parts or what is on it, in English or in Spanish, and the arrows at the top go back and forward through the pages you visited.

The pages

Fourteen pages in three groups: The shell, The desk and The session. Every option has one home, on the page of the thing it changes. A long page is split into parts, drawn as a strip under its title.

Page	Parts	What it holds
Bar	Style, Layout, Workspaces	The style, rounded screen corners, the sides, which screens carry it, its height and margins, its ground and shadow; what the bar carries and how each piece reads; the workspace strip, how many workspaces, and shared or per screen
Island	The island, Notifications	Floating or a notch, the glance, the clock and what runs beside the time; how long a notification stays, Do not disturb, the history
Control Centre		The grid’s size, the way into arranging it, and the buttons on its top row
Launcher	Results, Sigils, Clipboard	How results are ordered and how many, the first character for each mode, the clipboard history
Dock		The edge, the alignment, which screens it is on, the icon size and magnifying, its ground, background and shadow, how it behaves, and the applications kept on it
Desktop		The way into arranging; the face, ground, background and shadow every widget follows; whether the edge notes and the spectrum make way for windows
Modules		What the modules know, wherever they are: the weather’s location, whose GitHub contributions, the markets followed, the pet’s style, the lyrics, how a note is written
Appearance	Wallpaper, Terminal, Type, Motion	The theme and wallpaper and the transition; the terminal’s ground and its greeting scene; the interface and monospace fonts; game mode and the pace of the shell’s animations
Windows		The window layout, window rounding, border and gaps; inactive opacity, blur, refraction and the windows’ shadow; the animation preset
Displays	Arrangement, The screen, The lid	The screens and the laptop lid
Input	Keyboard, Pointer	Keyboard layouts and key repeat; sensitivity, the cursor’s colour and size, shake to find
Keys	The shell’s own, The compositor’s	Every key, for the profile in use
Session	Lock screen, Face unlock, When you leave	Your account’s name and picture, the lock’s clock, its music and its blur; face unlock; the idle waits
System	Profiles, Updates, This machine	Profiles and Reset; checking for updates and running them and the files you changed; the language and the machine with the version installed

The wallpaper and the palette themselves are chosen in the island: Appearance → Wallpaper → Theme opens them there (Palettes).

A setting made meaningless by another stays on the page, dimmed, and says which setting is responsible. What the machine lacks is dimmed the same way: refraction and shake to find say to run ./setup plugins. So is what a single screen cannot use (the bar’s and the dock’s On every screen, With more screens, Arrangement, The main screen), which says that only one screen is there.
A slider’s number is a field: click it, type, Enter.
Every group is one card, its rows ruled off by hairlines. The ⓘ beside a group’s name opens its note, which says what the group does and what to know before changing it; a click, not a hover, so the page holds still.
The help button at the top right, a question mark in a circle, opens this site at the page you are on, or at the part of it.
Everything that reaches Hyprland is kept by the shell and applied again after every reload. The Lua files in ~/.config/hypr/ are the fallback, and the window never writes them.

The settings window, with the sidebar on the left; the page shows three bar styles, grouped, spread and one island, whether the island floats or cuts into the top edge, its ground, classic or glass, and whether the sides sit in capsules or on the wallpaper. — The bar and the island

The settings window, with the sidebar on the left; the page shows the weather location, the GitHub username, the pet drawn four ways and how a note is written. — What the modules know

The settings window on the Control Centre page, with the sidebar on the left; the page shows the panel's columns and rows, the button to arrange it, and its top row with a button on each side and the rest in a tray to drag them from. — Control Centre

The settings window on the Dock page, with the sidebar on the left; the page shows whether the dock shows, the edge it sits on, its alignment, its ground (as the bar, classic or glass), its size and its background. — Dock

The settings window on the Launcher page, with the sidebar on the left; the page shows the order of results, how many are shown and a preview of the list, and under it the applications kept on the dock, kitty first. — Launcher

The settings window on the Appearance page, with the sidebar on the left; the page shows the theme and wallpaper, the wallpaper transition and the greeting scene. — Appearance

The settings window on the Displays page, with the sidebar on the left; the page is on The lid: what the laptop's screen does when the lid closes, and the screens connected right now. — Displays

The settings window on the Input page, with the sidebar on the left; the page shows the keyboard layouts, how to switch between them and the key repeat rate. — Input

The settings window on the Keys page, with the sidebar on the left; the page shows the shell's own key bindings, each one editable, with a search field. — Keys

The settings window on the Session page, with the sidebar on the left; the page shows when to lock, turn the screen off and suspend after the machine is left alone, all set to never. — Session

The settings window on the System page, with the sidebar on the left; the page shows the four profiles, Default, Fuji in use, Night bay and Moon castle, and the reset. — System

Window layouts

Every workspace tiles its windows one way, chosen under Windows → Shape → Layout.

Dwindle splits the space each new window lands in.
Master keeps one large window beside a stack of the rest.
Scrolling lays the windows in a row wider than the screen.

SUPER SHIFT L cycles the three, and the island says which it moved to. The layout is kept across Hyprland’s reloads. SUPER J flips dwindle’s split and turns master’s stack to its next side; in scrolling it does nothing.

Refraction

Refraction frosts and bends what is behind a window, like wet glass. It is a Hyprland plugin, hyprglass, switched under Windows → Depth → Refraction, and off out of the box. It shows only through translucent windows, which in practice means the terminal. Without the plugin the row is dimmed and says to run ./setup plugins.

Game mode

Game mode stills everything that moves, for a game or a slow machine. The shell’s animations stop, and so do the spectrum, the pet and the record. The island, the dock, the widgets and every glassy window turn classic and solid, the shell’s shadows go, and Hyprland drops its animations, blur, shadows and refraction. Every setting under it is kept, and comes back as it was when game mode goes off.

Switch it with SUPER SHIFT G, under Appearance → Motion → Game mode, or with the Game mode tile in the control centre; the island says which way it went. It stays on across a profile switch.

Profiles

A profile keeps a whole desk under a name, and the one in use takes every change as you make it: there is no save button. System → Profiles lists them, the one in use outlined, each with its wallpaper and a line for its bar, its dock and how many widgets it has.

In a profile	Kept by the machine, whatever the profile	In no profile
The bar, the widgets, the dock, the launcher, the control centre, the look, every key, the wallpaper and its palette	The screens and the lid, workspaces shared or per screen, your name and picture, the language, the keyboard layouts, the weather’s location, the GitHub user, the markets followed, Do not disturb, the night light, game mode, the camera’s effect and reactions	Notes, tasks, the clipboard, the pets, the game bests

The three that ship

Profile	Bar	Widgets	Wallpaper
Moon castle	One island	Analogue	`japanese-castle-full-moon.jpeg`
Fuji	Grouped bar	Modern	`pagoda-fuji-blossom.jpeg`
Night bay	Spread bar	Modern	`tropical-bay-night.jpeg`

A fresh install starts on Moon castle. Each of the three carries every key, the same set in all three, and each is laid out for a 1920 × 1200 screen. Each is added to the list once: one you delete stays deleted, and one an update brings is added.

Moon castle

Fuji

Night bay

Working with them

Switch, on a card, makes it the profile in use. Switching reloads Hyprland, so anything set by hand with hyprctl goes with it. Profiles are switched here and nowhere else.
New profile adds one and opens its name for typing; it is not switched to.
The ⋯ menu on a card: Rename, Duplicate, Export to a file…, and Delete — not on the one in use, and confirmed on the card, because there is no undo.
Import… adds a profile from a file, without switching to it. A file that does not parse, or is not a profile, is refused whole.
Reset this profile, under the list, puts every setting in the profile in use back to its default and reloads Hyprland. The machine’s settings are kept, and there is no undo.

An export is plain JSON: the name, the wallpaper’s path, the palette and the settings. It carries the path and not the picture, so on a machine without that painting the wallpaper already there stays up.

The profile in use is ~/.local/state/quickshell/settings.json, and the others wait in profiles.json beside it. An export is the backup.

Language

System → This machine → Language: English or Español. It is the language of the settings window: it never changes the system’s language or renames a folder in your home, and anything without a translation stays in English.

Updates

System → Updates checks for new commits to impasto itself, not the packages it runs. It asks the remote of the checkout impasto was installed from when the page opens — at most every half hour — and on Check, and lists what is waiting, newest first. The count starts from the version that was installed, so an update whose install stopped half-way still offers one.

Update, there only when something is waiting, says the version it leads to and runs ./setup update in a terminal, where its questions and your password stay visible. It is locked while the checkout holds commits of your own, which the pull would refuse. More in Updating.

The settings window on System, This machine: the Updates group with the check's reading, an Update row saying the version it leads to, and the list of commits waiting. — What is waiting, and one button to take it.

Changed files

System → Updates → Changed files lists the installed files you have edited or deleted, since an update leaves both as you left them. A deleted file has Restore, and deleted files are gathered by folder, so forty wallpapers are one line. An edited one has Reset, which puts impasto’s version back and keeps yours in the backups, or, when a newer version waits beside it as .new, Keep mine and Use the new one. The list follows every change as it happens. More in Updating.