stutter

A focus-aware process priority daemon for Hyprland.

When you switch windows, stutter automatically raises the CPU priority of the focused process and restores the previous one. This reduces input latency and makes the active window feel more responsive under load.

How it works

stutter connects to Hyprland's event socket and listens for activewindow events. On each focus change it calls setpriority(2) to set the focused process to nice -5 and resets the previously focused process back to 0. On exit, the last focused process is restored to the default priority.

Requirements

• Hyprland
• Permission to lower nice values - either run as root, or grant the binary CAP_SYS_NICE:

sudo setcap cap_sys_nice+ep ~/.local/bin/stutter

Installation

From GitHub Releases

Download the latest pre-built binary from the releases page, make it executable, and move it to your path:

chmod +x stutter
mv stutter ~/.local/bin/

From Source

cargo build --release
cp target/release/stutter ~/.local/bin/

Running as a systemd user service:

cp stutter.service ~/.config/systemd/user/
systemctl --user daemon-reload
systemctl --user enable --now stutter

Hyprland autostart

Alternatively, add to your hyprland.conf:

exec-once = stutter

License

MIT