Installation

WayRun is one Rust binary. Download a release or build it, put it on PATH, and bind a hotkey.

Requirements

• A Wayland compositor that implements wlr-layer-shell (zwlr_layer_shell_v1). This covers the wlroots family (niri, Hyprland, Sway, river, Wayfire, labwc, ...), KDE Plasma on Wayland and Mir-based compositors. GNOME/Mutter does not implement the protocol, so the overlay cannot be shown there.
• The runtime libraries it links against: GLib, SQLite, xkbcommon, fontconfig and the rest.
• A Rust toolchain and the development headers for those libraries, if you build from source.
• A font with CJK coverage for Chinese and Japanese queries, such as Source Han Sans.

Download a release

Releases ship a prebuilt binary for x86_64, built on Ubuntu 24.04. Download the latest wayrun-v*-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.gz from GitHub Releases, then:

tar -xzf wayrun-v*-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.gz
install -Dm755 wayrun ~/.local/bin/wayrun

~/.local/bin must be on your PATH. The tarball also carries NOTICE for the bundled icons. On another architecture or an older distribution, build from source.

Build from source

git clone https://github.com/Prslc/WayRun.git
cd WayRun
cargo build --release
ln -s "$(pwd)/target/release/wayrun" ~/.local/bin/wayrun

Published binaries use fat LTO and one codegen unit; a local build keeps the defaults, compiles faster, and comes out slightly larger.

First launch

Bind a hotkey, for example Alt+Space, to wayrun run:

wayrun run

The syntax for binding a key is compositor-specific. niri and Hyprland examples are in resident mode.

The first run writes commented templates for config.toml, theme.toml and plugins.toml. See Config, Theme and Plugins for their keys.

Feature dependencies

The overlay, and the built-in app, file and calculator search, need nothing beyond the compositor above. Every other feature depends on an optional component. When one is missing, the keyword returns no rows rather than an error.

Extra plugins (Firefox bookmarks and history, web suggestions, clipboard history, and more) install from the WayRun-Plugins workspace. The table lists what each feature needs:

Feature	Needs
copy / paste and the "Copy …" actions	wl-clipboard (wl-copy / wl-paste)
a terminal-only $PATH hit (r)	a terminal emulator ($TERMINAL, else one on PATH)
a blurred card	ext-background-effect-v1 (niri, KWin) or the compositor's own blur by namespace
per-row icons	a desktop icon theme (optional); without one, rows fall back to a bundled placeholder