Plugin guidelines

This page documents the recommended guidelines for making a stable and neat plugin.

Making your plugin compatible with hyprpm

In order for your plugin to be installable by hyprpm, you need a manifest.

hyprpm will parse hyprload manifests just fine, but it’s recommended to use the more powerful hyprpm manifest.

Make a file in the root of your repository called hyprpm.toml.

Repository metadata

At the beginning, put some metadata about your plugin:

[repository]
name = "MyPlugin"
authors = ["Me"]
commit_pins = [
    ["3bb9c7c5cf4f2ee30bf821501499f2308d616f94", "efee74a7404495dbda70205824d6e9fc923ccdae"],
    ["d74607e414dcd16911089a6d4b6aeb661c880923", "efee74a7404495dbda70205824d6e9fc923ccdae"]
]

name and authors are required. commit_pins are optional. See commit pins for more info.

Plugins

For each plugin, make a category like this:

[plugin-name]
description = "An epic plugin that will change the world!"
authors = ["Me"]
output = "plugin.so"
build = [
    "make all"
]

description, authors are optional. output and build are required.

build are the commands that hyprpm will run in the root of the repo to build the plugin. Every command will reset the cwd to the repo root.

output is the path to the output .so file from the root of the repo.

Commit pins

Commit pins allow you to manage versioning of your plugin. they are pairs of hash,hash, where the first hash is the Hyprland commit hash, and the second is your plugin’s corresponding commit hash.

For example, in the manifest above, d74607e414dcd16911089a6d4b6aeb661c880923 corresponds to Hyprland’s 0.33.1 release, which means that if someone is running 0.33.1, hyprpm will reset your plugin to commit hash efee74a7404495dbda70205824d6e9fc923ccdae.

It’s recommended you add a pin for each Hyprland release. If no pin matches, latest git will be used.

Formatting

Although Hyprland plugins obviously are not required to follow Hyprland’s formatting, naming conventions, etc. it might be a good idea to keep your code consistent. See .clang-format in the Hyprland repo.

Usage of the API

It’s always advised to use the API entries whenever possible, as they are guaranteed stability as long as the version matches.

It is, of course, possible to use the internal methods by just including the proper headers, but it should not be treated as the default way of doing things.

Hyprland’s internal methods may be changed, removed or added without any prior notice. It is worth nothing though that methods that “seem” fundamental, like e.g. focusWindow or mouseMoveUnified probably are, and are unlikely to change their general method of functioning.

Function Hooks

Function hooks allow your plugin to intercept all calls to a function of your choice. They are to be treated as a last resort, as they are the easiest thing to break between updates.

Always prefer using Event Hooks.

Threads

The Wayland event loop is strictly single-threaded. It is not recommended to create threads in your code, unless they are fully detached from the Hyprland process. (e.g. saving a file)