July 24, 2026

I built shy — a floating window manager for Hyprland

Making floating windows disappear when you don't need them

I've been using Hyprland for a while now and I really like the workflow. Most of the time I use tiled windows, but there are still things that work better as floating windows — file pickers, small utility windows, localsend, calculator etc.

The issue is that once a few of them are open, they just stay on the screen. Switching back to a tiled window doesn't really make them go away, so after some time my workspace starts looking messy.

I wanted floating windows to behave a bit differently. When I'm working in a tiled window, I don't want to see them. But I also don't want to close them and open them again later.

So I built shy.

shy hides floating windows below the screen whenever I focus a tiled window. When I focus a floating window again, it puts it back exactly where it was.

Focus a tiled window
      ↓
Move floating windows below the screen
      ↓
Focus a floating window
      ↓
Restore it to its old position

The window is still open the whole time, it is just not in the way.

How it works

Hyprland exposes an IPC socket which sends events when something changes. shy connects to it and listens for window events like activewindow, openwindow, closewindow and changefloating.

When the focused window is tiled, shy gets the position of every floating window, stores it and moves the window below its monitor. When a floating window gets focused, shy restores the stored position.

One thing I had to handle was hover focus. With some Hyprland configs, moving the mouse over a floating window can focus it. I didn't want that to suddenly restore all the hidden windows, so shy can ignore focus changes caused by hovering. It only reacts to focus changes from the keyboard or a window switcher.

It also supports multiple monitors and since it only reacts to events, it doesn't need to keep polling for windows in the background.

Setup

Install from source:

git clone https://github.com/yugaaank/shy.git
cd shy
cargo install --path .

Then start it with Hyprland.

For a Lua config:

hl.on("hyprland.start", function()
    hl.exec_cmd("~/.cargo/bin/shy")
end)

Or with hyprlang:

exec-once = ~/.cargo/bin/shy

The config file is at ~/.config/shy/config.toml:

hide_offset = 300
debug = false
ignore = ["rofi", "waybar", "walker"]
ignore_hover = true

hide_offset controls how far below the monitor a window is moved. ignore is useful for window classes that should never be hidden.

It is a small thing, but it makes mixing tiled and floating windows much less distracting for me.

The project is here: github.com/yugaaank/shy