43PR/dotfiles: a Hyprland setup for Arch, EndeavourOS and CachyOS

What 43PR/dotfiles actually is

This is a complete Hyprland desktop configuration, not a library or a package. The README describes it as a simple Hyprland setup focused on practical keybinds, productivity, and a smooth workflow easy to customize, offered as inspiration or as a starting point. The repository ships the config trees themselves: .config/ holds the live configuration, Wallpapers/ holds backgrounds plus a Showcase folder used for the README screenshots, CachyOs/ holds distribution-specific material, and install.sh is the entry point.

The audience is narrow and specific. You need an Arch-family system, because installation goes through pacman, and you need to be comfortable with a tiling compositor where Super is the modifier for almost everything. If you have never used a tiling window manager, the README points beginners at noctalia first, noting it is installed in CachyOS by default, and suggests implementing parts of this setup afterwards. That is an honest recommendation from the author and worth taking seriously.

The components and how they fit together

The setup is a stack of cooperating programs rather than one application. Hyprland is the compositor. Waybar is the status bar, and the README highlights mouse-wheel volume changes, mute, play/pause, next track and a blue light filter as bar features. Rofi handles application search, clipboard history and an opacity toggle. Hyprlock is the lock screen, Wlogout the logout menu, and the wallpaper selector is built on Awww plus Quickshell, with a separate project, hyprquickpaper, credited for the selector.

The terminal side is kitty with zsh, starship, eza icons, autosuggestions and syntax highlighting. Thunar is the file manager and xed the editor. Recent updates listed in the README add a volume OSD in quickshell, a media marquee effect and improved scripts in Waybar, and autohiding media controls in Hyprlock. The full program list lives in packages.txt, which is the file to read before committing, since it defines everything the installer will pull in.

Keybinds are the part most people will touch first. Super + T opens the terminal, Super + D the launcher, Super + W the wallpaper selector, Super + V clipboard history, Super + Tab the lock screen, and Super + Grave the logout menu. Workspaces are Super plus a number, and Super + Shift plus a number moves a window to that workspace. The README notes you can modify keybinds using HyprMod, and the complete list is in config/hypr/keybinds.lua.

Installing it and a first real use

The README asks you to read the whole installation section first, and the reason is that this is a replacement, not an addition. It states the setup is mainly intended for a clean installation, and that if you already have a desktop configuration you should implement the pieces manually instead. Existing configuration files that are being replaced are backed up automatically, so a mistake is recoverable, but the result is still the author's layout, not yours.

Start by installing git, which the README lists as the prerequisite:

sudo pacman -S git

Then clone the repository and run the installer from inside it. The README gives these four commands in sequence, and the chmod step matters because the script is not guaranteed to arrive executable:

git clone https://github.com/43PR/dotfiles.git
cd dotfiles
chmod +x install.sh
./install.sh

The README says to continue the installation until it is finished, then log out and back in. After the session restarts you should land in a Hyprland desktop with the Waybar bar at the top. Press Super + T and a kitty terminal should open; Super + D should bring up the Rofi launcher. If the GTK theme did not switch on its own, the README tells you to set it to dark manually.

Two post-install notes are worth acting on immediately. The README states the Waybar custom-gpu module is specific to the author's PC, so you can remove it or reimplement it for your hardware. And if the wallpaper picker misbehaves, the README says to delete the cached thumbnails at .cache/quickshell/thumbs/. Default programs are edited in config/hypr/hyprland.lua.

Where this setup will fight you

The installer's design is the main risk. It is a script that copies a config tree over yours, so any customization you have already made to the same files is displaced, not merged. The automatic backup makes this survivable, but it also means you can end up with two parallel configurations and no documented way to reconcile them. The README does not describe a rollback procedure beyond that backup.

The hardware coupling is the second issue. A GPU module written for one machine is not portable, and the README says so plainly rather than pretending otherwise. Anyone on a laptop with hybrid graphics, or on a desktop with a different card, should expect to edit or delete that module before the bar looks right.

The repository's declared primary language is CSS, which tells you where the effort went: the visual theme. That is consistent with a project whose README leads with screenshots and a monochrome theme, and it is a reasonable thing for a desktop rice to prioritize. It also means the shell scripts and Lua configuration are secondary in the author's attention, so read them before trusting them with anything you care about.

Finally, this is the wrong tool if you want a configuration you can version and compose piece by piece. There is no stow layout here, no per-package module selection, and no partial install documented. It is one script and one resulting desktop.

The alternative: managing dotfiles with stow

The most common alternative approach is GNU Stow, where each application's configuration lives in its own directory inside a dotfiles repository and stow creates symlinks into your home directory. The difference in mechanism matters more than the difference in outcome. With stow you install one package at a time, so you can take the Waybar configuration and leave the Hyprland keybinds alone. Removing a package is unlinking it. Nothing is copied over an existing file without you asking.

43PR/dotfiles takes the opposite approach on purpose. It is a curated whole, and the value is that the pieces are already tuned to work together: the Waybar scripts, the Quickshell wallpaper selector, the Hyprlock media controls and the keybind set all assume each other. A stow-based setup gives you that same end state only after you have made the same decisions yourself. If you want the decisions made for you and you are starting from nothing, the installer is faster. If you already have opinions, stow or plain manual copying will cost you less in cleanup.

Maintenance, licence and what to check

The repository is not archived and the last push was on 2026-09-16, so it is current as of this writing. There are no retrieved releases, which fits a dotfiles project: updates arrive as commits on main rather than as versioned artifacts. That has a practical consequence. If you clone today and pull in three months, you get whatever the author changed in between, with no changelog beyond the Recent updates block in the README and no tagged version to pin to. Forking the repository and pulling deliberately is the more controlled way to track it.

The licence is MIT, which permits use, modification and redistribution provided the copyright notice and permission notice are retained. That is permissive enough for personal and commercial use, but it says nothing about the licences of the individual programs the setup installs; packages.txt lists them, and each carries its own terms. None of this is legal advice, and the Spotify and Spicetify theming is credited in the README to darkthemer as an edited work, so check that separately if you redistribute it.

Before running install.sh, three files tell you most of what you need: packages.txt for every dependency, config/hypr/hyprland.lua for the default programs, and config/hypr/keybinds.lua for the complete keybind map. Reading those three is a shorter job than undoing an install you did not want.

Editorial conclusion

Adopt this if you are installing Arch, EndeavourOS or CachyOS from scratch and want a working Hyprland session without assembling Waybar, Rofi and Hyprlock yourself. Do not run install.sh on a desktop you already depend on: the README says it is mainly intended for a clean installation and that existing configuration files being replaced are backed up automatically, which is a replacement, not a merge. Before running it, read packages.txt to see every program the setup pulls in, open config/hypr/hyprland.lua to check the default programs, and confirm the custom-gpu Waybar module, which the README says is specific to the author's PC, is one you can remove.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. 43PR/dotfiles on GitHub
2. Issues
3. License: MIT
4. README