I used Codex to customize my Hyprland desktop – and learned a valuable AI lesson
I used Codex to customize my Hyprland desktop – and learned a valuable AI lesson
https://www.zdnet.com/article/codex-to-customize-my-hyprland-desktop/
Publish Date: 2026-05-18 12:13:00
Source Domain: www.zdnet.com
Jack Wallen/ZDNET
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ZDNET’s key takeaways
- Configuring the Hyprland window manager is challenging.
- I wanted to see how well AI would perform at creating a .conf file.
- There’s an important lesson to be learned here.
This is the year I realized how much I enjoy tiling window managers, and Hyprland is my favorite so far.
If you’ve never experienced a tiling window manager, know that they aren’t exactly for the faint of heart. They are driven by keyboard shortcuts, of which there are a lot to memorize. On top of that, most of them require configuration via text files.
Such is the case with Hyprland.
Hyprland is configured via the ~/.config/hyrp/hyrpland.conf file; for the uninitiated, it can be rather daunting. You really should know what you’re getting into before you make that first edit to the file.
Also: How to install Arch Linux without losing your mind
I’ve done a bit of Hyprland dotfile ricing (a fancy way of saying I’ve spent time customizing hyprland.conf files), but I decided to run a little experiment.
I wanted to see if AI could create a hyperland.conf file based on my prompt. I decided to start fresh with a CachyOS installation. (I selected both the Hyrpland and KDE Plasma desktops — why I added both will become clear shortly.) Once I had CachyOS up and running, I started the process. I decided to try three different AI tools: Opera’s Aria, Ollama, and Codex.
Of the three AI tools, Codex was the only one capable of creating a remotely usable configuration. Here’s how it went.
The prompt
To create the customization, I used the following prompt:
Create a hyprland.conf configuration file for Hyprland version 0.55.2 that uses Waybar with a glassy, rounded-corner theme, a color palette of purple and pink, and uses the following keybindings: Super+t to open the terminal, Super+b to open the web browser, and the default keybindings for moving windows and window focus.
Upon running the query, every AI service I used…
