You heard of Liquid Glass, now FEEL the Liquid Water
Water for Hyprland windows. A real-time wave simulation rendered as liquid glass: windows are viewports onto one shared sheet of water. Waves propagate, reflect, and interfere; light refracts through the surface and lands on whatever is behind the window.
Started as a fork of HyprGlass by Hyprnux — the blur/refraction glass pipeline remains from there. The water is new: the simulation, the caustics, the fluid dynamics, and the physics that ties them together.
- Wave simulation, not animated noise. A GPU wave-equation integrator: disturbances spread at finite speed, reflect off edges, interfere with their own reflections, and settle when the water is left alone.
- Energy-conserving caustics. Light is transported to where refraction actually sends it (forward splatting). Bright veins are paid for by the water around them going dim, and a finite-size sun blurs the pattern with depth, the way real pools work.
- Currents. A Stable Fluids velocity field: dragging a window leaves real whirlpools that carry and bend the waves crossing them.
- Window physics. Moving windows push a bow wave and shed a wake. Clicks splash. The cursor leaves a wake. All of it feeds one shared sheet, so overlapping windows agree about the water.
- One physical depth. The depth setting is in meters and drives four things at once: refraction (Snell), caustic focus, wave speed, and Beer–Lambert absorption (deep water turns blue because red is absorbed — the real coefficients, Pope & Fry 1997).
- Layer surfaces too. Bars, notification popups, and other layer-shell surfaces can be glassed, with per-namespace presets and mask thresholds.
| Hyprland | 0.56.x |
| Build | g++ (C++23), pkg-config, hyprland headers, pixman, libdrm |
With hyprpm:
hyprpm add https://github.com/swillunderscore/hyprwater
hyprpm enable hyprwaterManual:
make
hyprctl plugin load "$(pwd)/hyprwater.so"Everything lives under plugin:hyprwater:. The water:
| key | default | what it is |
|---|---|---|
shimmer:enabled |
1 | the water on/off |
shimmer:intensity |
— | caustic light strength (exposure-like) |
shimmer:speed |
1.0 | simulation rate; below 1 is slow motion |
shimmer:scale |
— | wave size on screen |
shimmer:depth |
1.0 | water depth in meters; drives refraction, caustic focus, wave speed, and absorption |
shimmer:viscosity |
0.6 | thicker water kills short ripples faster (real ν·k² dissipation) |
shimmer:agitation |
— | how often the ambient pool is disturbed |
shimmer:currents |
1 | the velocity field (whirlpools) |
shimmer:currents_resolution |
512 | fluid grid resolution |
shimmer:window_physics |
1.0 | bow waves and wakes from moving windows |
shimmer:mouse |
0.3 | cursor wake and click splashes; 0 = hands off the water |
shimmer:murk |
0 | scattering: haze that veils the backdrop (absorption is always on and physical) |
shimmer:light_from_backdrop |
1 | caustics are lit by what is behind the window rather than a lamp |
The glass (from HyprGlass, with dark:/light: theme variants for each):
blur_strength, blur_iterations, refraction_strength, fresnel_strength,
specular_strength, chromatic_aberration, edge_thickness, glass_opacity,
tint_color, lens_distortion, saturation, brightness, contrast,
vibrancy, vibrancy_darkness, adaptive_dim, adaptive_boost.
Readability (one time-smoothed average per window, so it doesn't pump with an animated wallpaper):
| Key | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|
adaptive_tint |
0 | strength; dims the backdrop until the window average is adaptive_target |
adaptive_target |
0.18 | average luma to dim down to (for light text) |
adaptive_speed |
2.0 | seconds to settle |
adaptive_tint_terminals_only |
0 | 1 = only terminal windows get it |
adaptive_white |
0 | 1 = white glass: terminal windows LIFT toward white instead, for dark text |
adaptive_white_target |
0.78 | average luma white glass lifts to |
Layer surfaces: layers:enabled, layers:namespaces,
layers:exclude_namespaces, layers:namespace_presets,
layers:namespace_mask_thresholds, layers:preset.
Presets: named bundles of the glass settings, defined in config and applied
per window rule (tag:hyprwater_preset_<name>) or per layer namespace.
default_theme / tag:hyprwater_theme_light pick the theme variant.
All keys
plugin:hyprwater:adaptive_boostplugin:hyprwater:adaptive_dimplugin:hyprwater:adaptive_speedplugin:hyprwater:adaptive_targetplugin:hyprwater:adaptive_tintplugin:hyprwater:adaptive_tint_terminals_onlyplugin:hyprwater:adaptive_whiteplugin:hyprwater:adaptive_white_targetplugin:hyprwater:blur_iterationsplugin:hyprwater:blur_strengthplugin:hyprwater:brightnessplugin:hyprwater:chromatic_aberrationplugin:hyprwater:contrastplugin:hyprwater:default_presetplugin:hyprwater:default_themeplugin:hyprwater:edge_thicknessplugin:hyprwater:enabledplugin:hyprwater:fresnel_strengthplugin:hyprwater:glass_opacityplugin:hyprwater:layers:enabledplugin:hyprwater:layers:exclude_namespacesplugin:hyprwater:layers:namespace_mask_thresholdsplugin:hyprwater:layers:namespace_presetsplugin:hyprwater:layers:namespacesplugin:hyprwater:layers:presetplugin:hyprwater:lens_distortionplugin:hyprwater:refraction_strengthplugin:hyprwater:saturationplugin:hyprwater:shimmer:absorptionplugin:hyprwater:shimmer:agitationplugin:hyprwater:shimmer:bed_variationplugin:hyprwater:shimmer:currentsplugin:hyprwater:shimmer:currents_resolutionplugin:hyprwater:shimmer:depthplugin:hyprwater:shimmer:enabledplugin:hyprwater:shimmer:intensityplugin:hyprwater:shimmer:light_from_backdropplugin:hyprwater:shimmer:mouseplugin:hyprwater:shimmer:murkplugin:hyprwater:shimmer:scaleplugin:hyprwater:shimmer:speedplugin:hyprwater:shimmer:viscosityplugin:hyprwater:shimmer:window_physicsplugin:hyprwater:specular_strengthplugin:hyprwater:tint_colorplugin:hyprwater:vibrancyplugin:hyprwater:vibrancy_darkness
- The simulation runs on its own framebuffers (fp16). Cost on a desktop GPU is a few percent; the caustic pass is rate-limited and resolution-bound.
- The wave equation is linear: waves do not break. Ambient chop is self-limiting instead.
- Plugins must be rebuilt when Hyprland updates. hyprpm handles this; for manual builds, rebuild before loading into a new Hyprland version.
Fork of HyprGlass by Hyprnux — the glass rendering pipeline is theirs. Everything water is Swill Software.
BSD-3-Clause. The LICENSE file carries both copyright lines.