hyprdie

A graceful shutdown screen for Hyprland.

hyprdie throws a fullscreen overlay over everything still running in your session, asks each app to close, escalates when one refuses, and only then exits. So a reboot stops silently eating unsaved work.

Get hyprdie → how it works

one layer surface, drawn straight through wl_shm — no toolkit, no GTK

quickstart

Spray it in

# build — the build script pkg-configs xkbcommon headers ▸ git clone https://github.com/nnthnn/hyprdie ▸ cargo build --release ▸ sudo install -Dm755 target/release/hyprdie /usr/local/bin/ # bind it — ~/.config/hypr/hyprland.conf ▸ bind = $mainMod SHIFT, E, exec, hyprdie --post-cmd 'systemctl poweroff' # or see exactly what it would do before trusting it with your session ▸ hyprdie --dry-run
under the hood

How it kills a session

  1. Collects the session's processes, preferring the systemd session cgroup over a process-tree walk — the walk can miss apps that have been reparented. It excludes Hyprland's own ancestors, so it never tears the session down from under itself.
  2. Picks up layer surfaces — bars, notification daemons — via hyprctl -j layers, so nothing outlives the session.
  3. Asks each window to close with hyprctl dispatch closewindow, and sends SIGTERM to each process.
  4. Retries every behavior.retry_interval_ms — watching the live app list shrink as things fall over.
  5. Anything still breathing after behavior.sigkill_timeout_ms is escalated to SIGKILL.
  6. When nothing is left, runs commands.post and then hyprctl dispatch exit.
what you get

Little cruelties, thoughtfully applied

Graceful first

Every app gets a polite closewindow and a SIGTERM before anything is killed. Only the stubborn ones get escalated.

Escalation on a timer

Refusing to die just delays the inevitable: after a configurable timeout, SIGKILL lands automatically.

Live app list

The overlay re-polls hyprctl -j clients every tick, so closed apps vanish and the remaining count ticks down as you watch.

Layer surfaces too

Bars and notification daemons are pulled in via hyprctl -j layers instead of being left to outlive the session.

Never kills its own session

Hyprland's ancestors — the display manager's session helper and the launcher — are subtracted from the kill set, and hyprdie removes its own PID every poll.

Post command ordering

commands.post runs before Hyprland exits and hyprdie waits for it, so systemctl reboot can authorise with logind while the session is alive.

Dry run

--dry-run shows the overlay and closes nothing — the safe way to see what it does before binding it to a key.

Background image

Point ui.background at a file and it's cover-scaled to the output. The format is sniffed from the content, not the extension.

Configurable to the bone

Title, every text colour, timings, and the command that runs last — all optional in ~/.config/hyprdie/config.toml.

Hard to kill by accident

Closing the terminal that launched it won't take it down — SIGHUP is ignored so it survives long enough to finish the job.

No toolkit

The surface is ARGB wl_shm through smithay-client-toolkit. No GTK, no winit, no runtime dependencies beyond Hyprland and systemd.

Safe fallback discovery

When there's no session cgroup to lean on, it walks the process tree instead. It may miss a reparented app, but it never reaches Hyprland's own ancestors.

controls

Two keys. That's the whole UI.

ESC

Cancel

Closes nothing and leaves the session running. The escape hatch.

F

Force

Kills every tracked process at once with SIGKILL, then continues the shutdown. Only changes how apps close — the post command and exit still run.

before you start

What it needs

GitHub → readme config