Niri 26.04: Scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor (opens in new tab)

Same. I also find Niri paired with an ultrawide curved monitor to be particularly good.

Omarchy introduced a per-workspace toggle to scrollable mode like this. Press Win/Cmd + L and it switches from tiling to scrolling and back. I use it all the time now.

this. I really enjoyed the Niri approach when I discovered it and missed something similar for my mac. This is the best implementation I have tested so far, and while there are definitely some quirks, at least in my case I feel it completely usable as a daily driver(love the tabbed columns) kudos to maintainer and contributors

Paneru is a new thing for macOS made specifically to emulate niri.

I'm sorry, but they have the worst demo video I have seen in my life. Nobody will want to try their software after watching that video. If you watch it, you will probably want to uninstall it, even if you're already a user.

I had wanted to switch to niri for some time, but it was always a massive, several day process to figure out all the accessory config (top bar, idle timeouts, notifications, etc.). Mentioned in another comment that I have since discovered that there are wayland "desktop shells" that provide the majority of the kit and kaboodle you'd expect from gnome or whatever, with minimal or no fussing, including settings dialogs, application trays, resource monitoring, top bars, etc. I'm using dank material shell for this currently, but it's really cool being able to arbitrarily compose the desktop shell and the compositor.

Same, I also enjoy the fact that PaperWM is a mostly non-intrusive Gnome extension. Also apart from generally improving my workflow, it enabled me to remove two or three other extensions I was using (desktop grid and others, I forgot which).

I've always (KDE, GNOME, niri) used a workspace per activity/project. I have a workspace with Steam open and a game wiki I was consulting earlier, another workspace with Emacs and browser with documentation, a third workspace with Godot and some gamedev apps open. The beauty of niri is that I never feel I need to close some apps because I've got "too many windows"; it's quite easy to compartmentalize

I never understood the point of per-app workspaces. I hate having, for example, a single Firefox instance open with everything mixed in, from work to leisure.

I was a tiling user for quite a while.similar setup to you (used awesome then qtile, short stind with xmonad and ended up with i3 and then switching to Wayland with sway, but tried hyprland for a bit as well). One thing I always ran into was that I generally found that more than three windows are horizontally just doesn't work and vertical splits very often make windows to small either. On the other hand I would often find that I wanted a new window next to something I was reading or working on, or e.g. I'd have some terminals open and wanting to plot from ipython. That always caused quite a bit of friction, i.e. I'd have to either collect some windows into a stacked layout before opening the new window. Or moving some of the windows is want side by side to a new workspace. That for me meant I had to think about what I was doing when window managing, taking my focus away from my actual task.

With niri I just open another window and it's where I need it and all other windows are still to the left and right so I just "scroll" there. Now I'd say my workflow is messier now, but I think that's actually a good thing. Tiling window managers require (but also make it reasonably easy) to be organised. With niri I don't have to be organised. Sometimes it you can't find a window immediately, but you can just use overview (and I also have a window search rofi). Initially I still had some named workspaces similar to my sway tags, mainly because I found I was still switching to them out of habit. Nowadays I don't use them any longer.

I switched from KDE with almost what you mentioned: Workspace 1 had a fullscreen terminal with zellij, Workspace 2 had a browser, workspace 3 had two chat apps open and that was it. Bindings to switch between those. I switched to niri because it was different and more lightweight than a full plasma setup at first, but now adapted my workflow a bit. Most of the time, the individual windows I have are screen-sized still, similarly organized: 1 has development, 2 has browser(s) and occasionally my email reader, 3 has my chat apps. I open new terminal windows more frequently for just firing a few commands or starting some long-running thing that I need to look at from time to time. With KDE, I had these windows in the background, now I have them side-by-side on "1". "Alt-Tab"ing between them in retrospective feels clunky now compared to Super-hjkl'ing through the windows... YMMV of course, but I think my workflow got "lighter" because of that, no more "windows over eachother" but rather "next to eachother" ... gives a feeling of lightness to me.

My perspective is: Workspaces dedicated to a single app makes no sense for tiling WMs. That workflow is fine on a floating WM.

Where tiling WMs shine is when actually tiling windows. For me it's the holy trinity of Browser, editor and terminal all visible at once, and navigatable spatially via super+hjkl or super+up/down/left/right. So I have one workspace per project which makes a lot more sense to me as an actual workflow for tiling WMs.

Niri just improves on this substantially by allowing new windows to open to the right, instead of messing with the existing layout in the current workspace. For example, if I need to open a pdf or something. I get to keep the holy trinity, but swap over to the new window easily.

That's not actually tiling, is it? To me that reads like fullscreen with workspaces.

If one uses a manual tiling window manager like i3 or sway and a large monitor one can divide the screen into separate work areas that each host multiple applications based on their role in one's workflow and use less workspaces.

Scrolling makes a similar but different workflow practical on small screens where flexibility matters.

I was an i3 and away user before switching to Niri.

I generally use one workspace per task with some workspaces dedicated to specific apps (eg my browser workspace). Every app is full screen, always. I tend to use niri’s scrolling mainly for related work on one task, for example, I have my editor working on a project, scroll left and I have kilo code open on that project, and scroll right I have terminals or other related things.

So I mainly use a sway-like workflow except things tightly coupled to a specific task as on the same workspace and I scroll left or right to get to them. Everything is either full screen or sometimes 3/4 width (and full height). Occasionally I have two terminals vertically split on one column.

i create 4 fixed workspaces per monitor in the config, and use it that way

I used window managers for years, but the hurdle of actually configuring stuff not-related to the WM itself (like setting up dark mode) made me switch to a full-fledged desktop environment. Thanks for mentioning Noctalia - it looks like exactly what I needed!

Fewer problems such as? For me niri has been rock solid.

Actual prodigy though. Check out the release notes, they are a thing of beauty.

I'm in a similar boat, but I've found where I once habitually put things in the same workspace every time and was able to trivially recall them, I now end up all over the place.

Also I've been missing scratch deeply.

I'm sure it's solvable with some diligence and config changes, but I haven't invested the time yet.

=== SCRATCHPADS ===

I've avoided needing them because of 2 niri features:

- You can quickly tap alt+tab to focus the last previously focused window (assignable to a custom bind if you want)

- niri's CLI is very easy to work with so you can build a general purpose "launch or focus" shell script in a few lines of code

If you have something like Discord or any app you want to only be opened once, you can "launch or focus" it and now it's running somewhere. Somewhere as in, you can control which workspace it's on at your discretion.

Then if you launch it again from anywhere, you'll jump right to it instead of launching a 2nd instance and you can tap alt+tab to go back to exactly where you were before.

A nice effect is after it's been launched once it never interferes with your existing windows since nothing is getting opened again.

I'm after the end result of "let me access this program quickly no matter where I am", it doesn't need to literally follow me around every workspace to do that.

The launch or focus model can be applied to GUI apps and also TUIs.

=== SPATIAL MEMORY ===

niri's overview gives you a holistic view of everything. Status bars can also show you which workspaces are in use (and even open apps if you want that).

In addition to that, certain launchers like Walker have shortcuts to let you switch windows. This means you're only ever 1 global hotkey away from seeing a list of every window that's open and being able to fuzzy find switch to it in a second. I use this all the time. If you're not using Walker you can build this in a few lines of code since niri's CLI gives you a list of open windows.

My dotfiles have both things set up https://github.com/nickjj/dotfiles.

> pushing different applications so they can fit on a single screen. In i3wm i have "perfect vision" of a workspace.

What does this mean?

Super+side mouse buttons, which also works because niri workspaces are vertical. Also my right hand is always on the mouse.

Exactly as you do. The thing that's different at first is that workspaces are organized vertically rather than horizontally, but I for one adapted to that really quick (coming from KDE).

on MacOS I used to use Yabai but moved away from it to using a hammerspoon setup to manipulate window positions. This was mostly because bsp just doesn't scale well with larger displays, in my opinion.

For me, the spatial mapping of windows comes naturally, though. For MacOS, I have 9 spaces. This can be as many or as little as you want, but for me, I have keybindings to switch between them, starting with ctrl + shift and then I map it to:

  u i o
  j k l
  m , . 

So in this array, top left is 'u', bottom right is '.' Then you are arbitrarily assigning that area for a certain kind of task or work. so maybe for communications (Teams, Discord, iMessage, etc.) may be designated as being in the 'j' space, or west. My primary work space where I web browsing or coding might be the 'k' area. My email could be 'u' and calendar 'i'. If you've ever worked with two windows side by side, then you already reasoning about it spatially. On the left is my terminal. On the right is my web browser. This just extends that concept slightly. I use 9 spaces in a square shape because it just translates to an extra large desktop.

With that being said, things I'm frequently using (browser, terminal, mail, music, discord, etc) have their own global keys set to launch or switch to them and that is actually what I use most. I think if you can think about how you'd like to organize your system, just practicing that will help you reason about it that way.

I've been trying Niri on my thinkpad and I really like it, though I think I agree that it can be trickier to spatially map where things are in it. Its spaces are vertical and then you are scrolling the horizontal plane. They aren't always the same dimensions because it depends on how many windows are open. Getting back to say, the top right space, requires more work, at least out of the box. But on a smallish laptop screen I think it is well thought out way to make it easier to swap between different views.

If I'm understanding the ask, I think niri has this. Workspaces for each output are independent, and switching between them only affects the focused output.

The only remaining feature I would like is focus-follows-mouse but only for outputs, so that if I've moved my mouse over onto a second monitor, the focus moves to that output.

There are a few discussions around this, so I'm hopeful to see it implemented at some point:

- https://github.com/niri-wm/niri/discussions/1318

- https://github.com/niri-wm/niri/discussions/378

- https://github.com/niri-wm/niri/discussions/491

The hyprland developer is extremely talented, for his age, but still the mistakes of youth are very apparent: rash decisions, changing for change sake, my way or the highway, etc.

If he sticks with the project until he grows out of the impulsive phase, hyprland will be in a much better place.

I sympathise with this. I don't use macOS by choice, but because my employer forces me to do so as the security team has a dated understanding of the state of desktop Linux and MDM software.

The challenge with macOS window managers seems to be handling movement of windows between spaces, particularly when the display configuration changes (e.g. when docking and undocking a laptop, or opening and closing the lid). I've tried Yabai, AeroSpace, OmniWM, Hammerspoon w/ PaperWM.spoon, and Rift. None of them have delivered the level of polish Niri achieves.

What's keeping you on X? Some apps still broken for you?

I switched to Wayland a few months back and it's been pleasantly boring