Scroll Indicator

Hyprland's scrolling layout has no built-in position indicator: you can't tell how many windows are off-screen or where you are in the row. This bar widget adds one: one dot per column, ● for the focused column and ○ for the rest. It hides itself on workspaces that don't use the scrolling layout.

○ ● ○ ○      ← 4 columns, the 2nd is focused

Plugin

Field	Value
ID	83raiders/scroll-indicator
Entries	Bar widget: dots

Requirements

• Hyprland 0.56 or newer (reads tiledLayout and workspace names from hyprctl -j).
• hyprctl on PATH (ships with Hyprland).
• socat on PATH, for live updates from Hyprland's event socket. Without it the widget falls back to polling every 0.4 s.

Usage

1. Enable the plugin in Settings → Plugins, or run noctalia msg plugins enable 83raiders/scroll-indicator.

2. Add the dots widget to a bar section, for example in settings.toml:

   [bar.default]
   center = [ "workspaces", "scroll", "clock" ]
   
   [widget.scroll]
   type = "83raiders/scroll-indicator:dots"
   

3. Switch to a workspace that uses the scrolling layout. The dots update as you move between columns, open or close windows. Hover the widget for "Scrolling: column 2 of 4". Windows stacked in the same column count as one dot; floating windows are not counted.

Example setup

Built for one scrolling workspace with 2/3-width columns on a large (4K) screen, used as a parking spot for apps you want to keep open but don't need to look at often (Hyprland has no minimize). Each window keeps plenty of room, and a slice of the next column stays visible.

-- Hyprland Lua config: workspace 10 (the ALT+0 key) uses the scrolling layout
hl.workspace_rule({ workspace = "10", layout = "scrolling", persistent = true })

hl.config({
  scrolling = {
    column_width = 2/3,
    follow_focus = true,
  },
})

The widget works with any column width and on any workspace using the scrolling layout.

Notes

Everything the plugin runs:

Process	When	Why
sh -c "hyprctl -j activeworkspace; hyprctl -j activewindow; hyprctl -j clients"	on each relevant Hyprland event, plus every 2 s as a safety net (every 0.4 s without socat)	read the workspace layout, the focused window and window positions
socat -U - UNIX-CONNECT:$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/hypr/$HYPRLAND_INSTANCE_SIGNATURE/.socket2.sock	once, while the widget is loaded	listen to Hyprland's read-only event socket so the dots update instantly

No network access and no file writes. Hyprland only; other compositors are not supported.

Source and issues: https://github.com/83raiders/hypr-scroll-indicator

Idea from jtams/waybar-hyprland-scroll-indicator (a Go module for Waybar). This is an independent Luau implementation for Noctalia.