The tiny Hyprland tweak that fixed my flow

The issue

You have two monitors. A few workspaces on each. You hit SUPER+TAB a couple of times. Where do you land?

Probably not where you expected.

What’s happening is subtle. You press the keybind on one monitor, but Hyprland jumps to the next workspace that has a window—on any monitor. It doesn’t care about where your eyes are. So you press it again, expecting to loop back, and suddenly you’re looking at a different screen trying to figure out what just happened.

This is the default behavior. Both Omarchy and Hyprland ship with this binding:

bindd = SUPER, TAB, Next workspace, workspace, e+1

The e stands for empty. Hyprland skips empty workspaces and jumps to the next one that actually has something open.

That makes sense if you think of workspaces as a single global list. But that’s not how I naturally think about them. I think in terms of screens: I’m here, on this monitor, give me the next thing here.

If that sounds familiar, this might be worth changing.

Let’s picture it

This only really clicked for me after I understood how Hyprland models workspaces.

Each workspace is tied to a monitor. Once a workspace gets used on a monitor, it lives there. You don’t get a “workspace 1” on every monitor. There is just one workspace 1, and it belongs to a specific monitor.

That took a bit of unlearning.

My setup ended up looking like this:

MONITOR A
* workspace 1
* workspace 2
* workspace 3
* workspace 4
* workspace 5
  
MONITOR B
* workspace 6
* workspace 7
* workspace 8
* workspace 9
* workspace 10

It’s a simple split. Five per monitor. Nothing fancy. And yes, you can push this further and have way more workspaces if you want.

Now imagine I’m on workspace 3. I press SUPER+TAB. I go to workspace 4. All good.

But if I’m on workspace 5 and press it again, I land on workspace 6—which lives on monitor B. So I didn’t just change workspace. I changed monitors too.

You could argue that this is consistent. And it is. But it breaks the way I expect navigation to feel. Especially if your workspaces aren’t neatly grouped like this. If they’re mixed, you end up bouncing between monitors constantly.

That’s where it starts to feel off.

The fix

This ended up being much simpler than I expected.

First, remove the default bindings:

+ unbind = SUPER, TAB
+ unbind = SUPER SHIFT, TAB

Then rebind them with a small change:

+ bindd = SUPER, TAB, Next workspace on monitor, workspace, m+1
+ bindd = SUPER SHIFT, TAB, Prev workspace on monitor, workspace, m-1

The key difference is the m.

Instead of cycling globally, Hyprland now cycles within the current monitor. m+1 moves forward, m-1 moves backward. Same keys, same habit—but now it respects where you’re looking at.

Back to the earlier example: if I’m on workspace 5 and press SUPER+TAB, I go to workspace 1 on the same monitor. No unexpected jumps.

Why this matters

The best shortcuts are the ones you don’t need to think about.

With the default behavior, I was constantly double-checking. Pressing SUPER+TAB, glancing around, mentally retracing steps. It added just enough friction to break flow.

Now it’s predictable. My hands do the thing, and the result matches what I had in mind.

No surprises. No context switching. Just movement that makes sense.