Niri is so good. I've switched to using it about 5 months ago and it was legit the best computing decision I can remember making in recent history to move away from Windows.
I have a huge amount of gratitude towards the author of niri.
My dotfiles have always included an install script for setting everything up around command line tools, theme switching and more but it fully supports niri now too on Arch based distros https://github.com/nickjj/dotfiles in case anyone is shopping around for a new desktop environment and wants to get going quickly. I run it on both my main desktop and a travel laptop.
Same². I started to regret having an ultrawide, until I discovered that it was made for Niri. I never loved my screen and linux as much as I do since Niri.
Yeah it is a dream on ultrawides. I was able to get a decent custom config with Qtile, but Niri is so much more natural. Being able to hit mod+c and center the current window is just so perfect on the ultrawide.
If it helps get folks more comfortable configuring niri I'd say it's a win, but personally I'm happy with editing niri's config file directly.
Also, my dotfiles come with a custom Walker menu to find and search through niri key binds, selecting the key bind will run the action too.
With that said, if you're using my dotfiles and want to use this tool, it would be as simple as adding "nirimod-git" to the `PACKAGES_AUR_GUI_EXTRAS` variable in your config file.
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.
Yep, Hyprland recently added scrolling as a main line feature and since Omarchy is using Hyprland it can expose that feature.
I started with Hyprland when it didn't have scrolling built-in and all of the scrolling plugins were either really buggy or missing important features.
Ended up very quickly switching to niri and never looked back because I found it to be much more stable in general, plus niri handles multiple monitors in IMO the perfect way. niri is much different than Hyprland. It's not only about scrolling windows. It's how everything is put together and works together.
Niri introduced scroll-based window management to me and it instantly clicked. I'm very happy to see a full-on Niri per-workspace emulation mode in OmniWM[1] for the Mac, recently and thankfully made compatible with Sequoia. It immediately became my main window manager.
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
If you are on a Mac, check out OmniWM, which has a Niri layout, in addition to one that's more like Hyprland. It has made my work on MacOS much more pleasant.
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.
This is 100% visual software used for one of the most important functions of a computer: window management. I can't think of any software where it is more important that the demonstration video is good.
What else than a video would be suitable for demonstrating this software?
I’ve been using the PaperWM extension for Gnome (that I believe Niri took inspiration from?), and it’s definitely an interesting way to work. I’m not sure that I love it, I feel like it’s a bit cumbersome when I have more than 3 windows in a single workspace.
But I’m giving it a real shot, and the nice thing about it being a Gnome extension is that the rest of the Gnome DE is right there without a ton of config.
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.
NGL, Claude has made this sort of thing so much easier. It used to take a very long time to get a WM just the way you wanted it, especially if you were using new tools you were unfamiliar with and weren't sure if they'd do what you wanted them to. Now it takes a few hours. There's value to learning to do it by hand...but honestly, when I've got everything set up I don't mess around with it much, and by the time I want to change something I have to relearn it all anyway. My setups aren't super complicated, just refined, so it's all pretty readily comprehensible.
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 gotten so used to the tiling WM workflow of quick-switching between a bunch of different dedicated fullscreen workspaces and managing windows with pure keyboard. Each workspace typically has a single app, or terminal with tmux, but occasionally I’ll split two apps side by side.
Would love to hear the perspective of anyone who switched from a similar workflow to Niri. How does the mental model shift?
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.
This is the way. I see so many people using tiling WMs that have dedicated workspaces per app, even worse, are all full screen. What is the point?
Being able to have one window of Firefox per project workspace, with only tabs relevant to that project - this alone is a better than the myriad of ways Firefox themselves have tried to solve it within the app.
The point is to dedicate maximum screen real estate to the primary thing you’re working on.
I tile within one monitor when I legitimately want to see things side by side, but I certainly don’t want firefox permanently taking up screen space when I really only need to occasionally look at it. Usually it’s on a separate monitor in the same workspace, or in a dedicated workspace.
Maybe there’s some way I could manipulate stacks and zooms to achieve that within one workspace, but I’ve always found it easier to just have firefox on a separate workspace I can easily quickly swap to and from when needed.
If you are trying to maximize screen real estate to the thing you are working on, why not just use a regular floating window manager will all the apps full screen? I don't see how that isn't equivalent. You can even use multiple workspaces with them too.
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.
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.
Most workspaces are a fullscreen browser or some other app to the left, fullscreen editor in the center, tmux on the right.
I still use tiling within a monitor to view email side-by-side with browser, or a document or two side-by-side with code. Rarely feel the need to put 3+ apps in a complicated layout on one screen since I’m usually not gonna be cross-referencing at them all at once.
If I had one monitor I wouldn’t want to be taking up half of it showing the browser all the time when I could instead use that real estate for more vim splits.
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.
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 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!
I was on the same boat as you. I installed noctalia after having tried and not really getting a perfect arch / niri / waybar setup.
I think I'm completely done after like 6 hours which is insanely fast, and it really is everything I ever wanted. It is cohesive, easy to style, has good defaults, includes essential programs like polkit agent and notification daemon / osd, has a ton of plugins.
There are a lot of them (like Celestia, DMS etc) and they look very good too. They are all based on QuickShell which provides the actual building blocks.
I use mangowm on the wl-only branch(which is based on wlroots 0.20). It uses a lot less resources, has more layouts and I have fewer problems with it. Although niri seems to have more eye candy. It's definitely worth giving a try. If you want HDR, you have to wait though.
I switched to Niri at the end of last year after over a decade on i3.[1] Having horizontal scroll unbounded by my monitor size and workspace count unbound by the number of shortcut keys I have configured has been very freeing, and the graphical stuff is nice too.
My only remaining pain point is that its X compatibility layer, xwayland-satellite, does not yet support drag and drop between X and Wayland programs.[2]
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.
I'd agree with sph about having one workspace per activity. I've never had a rigid workflow with lots of permanent named workspaces, but I have a workspace-naming script that lets me label my numbered workspaces after they've been set up.
Other things that help include a fuzzel-based open window searcher and, to be honest, restrained use of Niri's flagship scrolling feature. Most of my workspaces most of the time are the same size as my screen, with the scroll used very sparingly for usually temporary overflow.
I guess it also helps that I never used the i3 scratchpad so I don't miss it.
I mentioned elsewhere that scrolling WMs shine when you use a workspace per activity. You should never "have stuff all over the place", you should be working on a single one until you context switch.
For people that went from i3wm to Niri, I would love to be convinced.
Being a i3wm(now sway) user, I tried Niri but found the following points a little bit uncanny:
- (Cropping) Sometimes when I scroll by shifting focus, a little bit like 10% of the window I pushed to the left keeps appearing. I tried to configure Niri in such a way that never a tiny fraction of a window be cropped but couldn't manage. Not sure I missed some config though.
- (Scratchpads) No scratchpads. There's workaround that I saw using extension scripts, but felt cumbersome to use(not the script itself, I just wished it was native feature on Niri). I use scratchpads a lot for "global" apps like email, discord, obsidian so I can open them on any workspace I am at, then make them disappear completely after.
- (Spatial Memory) By being used to i3wm I am comfortable pushing different applications so they can fit on a single screen. In i3wm i have "perfect vision" of a workspace. Niri style keeps me "forgetting" what's to the left and right. I know I can zoom out, but feels like friction upon my short term memory.
I would love to receive any suggestion so I overcome these points that I stumbled upon. Soon I might be trying Niri again on a more work environment(my first try was on a PC connected to TV, so more media focused usage).
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.
i3 shows title bars (shrinking or expanding them) kind of like how tabs are displayed in a web browser. If you do nested layouts with i3, though, you wont be able to see all the title bars, but otherwise usually you can see all the title bars (though truncated to fit). That's a pretty common workflow, and it gives you "perfect vision" of all the windows in that workspace. Vs niri which by default scrolls the whole window (title bar included) off the screen, so you can't see all the windows in the workspace at a glance.
I'm on hyprland (which also has a scrolling layout). How do you guys navigate between your workspaces? I'm accomodated to super+<num>, which jumps to workspace #<num> with a mostly fixed purpose. If I opened something ad-hoc, I usually know where I placed it. I found it difficult to operate in a setting which more resembles the state of my desk (if it weren't random access).
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).
I recently switched to niri after bouncing off it about a year ago, and this time it stuck.
One thing I learned in the process was that the custom wayland desktop world has the concept of a "desktop shell," which provides most or all of the additional components you might want on top of your compositor, rather than having to separately install a top bar, manage suspend/hibernate, figure out notifications, etc. You can of course still do all of that, but you can also just install niri and something like the "dank material shell"[0] and be off to the races. I first discovered this via awesome-niri[1].
The combination of niri and the shell means that the extent of my custom NixOS configuration for the two is entirely limited to keybindings and some custom window rules for zoom.
I used Niri on a Framework laptop a few months ago, and it was Okay. I don’t think it clicked with me/I’m not sure if I was using it right, but it was giving me a headache to mentally deal with spatially mapping all of my windows (I came from MacOS where I just knew which windows I had open and cmd+tab into the right one when needed)..
I think I would’ve adjusted best if I could somehow just watch someone do their daily work on Niri, to learn how to use it right. Curious if people who like Niri came from tiling WMs or standard DEs.
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.
Slightly off topic: Does anyone know a window manager where you can map virtual desktops to real monitors? E.g. When I'm on the move I cycle through my virtual desktops on my laptop screen, but when connecting a monitor I want to cycle between my virtual desktops independently on either screen. While both screens share the same set of virtual desktops.
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.
Niri can even do one better: if you configure a keybind for the move-workspace-to-monitor-next or -prev actions you can move entire spaces between monitors, with wrap around. You can do the same for a column of windows (by default an individual window, but you can stack windows such that only one is visible in a group or that they're all visible in rows). I'll usually split my chat/monitoring spaces from my active development ones so I can passively refer back to them whilst working on an active task.
Niri offers a wonderful workflow; it really is an excellent piece of software.
Seems almost like what I want. It's a bit smarter too, I guess I'll give it a try:
> Each monitor contains an independent set of workspaces arranged vertically. [...] You can move a workspace to a different monitor [...]
> When you disconnect a monitor, its workspaces will automatically move to a different monitor. But, they will also "remember" their original monitor, so when you reconnect it, the workspaces will automatically move back to it.
A few releases back when niri got "proper" Alt-Tab behavior like one expects from more mainline WMs made it pretty much perfect for me. Could not dream of wanting anything more than what it already has.
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:
Another vote on niri being just great software. While itss idea (scrolling tiling windows manager) is novel, the software in itself is very polished with a very mature API that doesn't change at every version (looking at you hyprland).
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.
Give me Niri on macOS pleaaaaaase. I tried the variants but it’s not there yet, I want native trackpad gesture integration, either no animations or buttery smooth ones with full control, blur please, and everything else.
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.
I use hyprland. And I navigate with ALT+? commands for the main apps I use, and alt+tab strictly to go back to previous workspace. I also have a task bar that I can also click to navigate when I need (on waybar). I love it. I'm never in some intermediate state like a view of all my workspaces, or holding alt tab to choose some workspace - it's always a single hotkey stroke. I also have 3 special workspaces that use alt+scroll-up/scroll-down/middle-mouse-button-click, for my password manager, my dashboard, and my music (strawberry).
I encourage everyone using the ubuntu/windows paradigm to check this out instead. Windows users see me working and their jaws drop, because it's so fast and smooth.
If anyone's curious I use ALT+: e for file manager (thunar), w for chrome, a for whatsapp, x for terminal, c for claude web, y for youtube, n for a notepad-style program, d for launcher (fuzzel), t for sublime, z for emacs, v for clipboard history, f for full screen, q to kill active and f1 for a emacs capture-dialog. g sends a window to a ws on my main monitor, and alt+shift+g sends it to secondary monitor.
This sounds very interesting. I'm currently in the middle of revisiting my desktop setup and interaction style. Landed on Qtile/Wayland but now I'm starting to notice lag.
> Every monitor has its own separate window strip. Windows can never "overflow" onto an adjacent monitor
I'm someone who was very content with the constraint of a laptop (one single screen, generally running one maximized window per workspace and switching with F-keys), but has never really become comfortable with multi-monitors. Can anyone explain why window managers always default to treating individual monitors as completely separate entities rather than one larger screen that works together? Like I would have thought the default here would be to have two monitors operate on the same horizontally-scrolling set of windows. Either tied together, or as independent viewports. But everybody always seems to reach towards treating each monitor as having disjoint windows. Which I guess I can get used to, it just seems odd?
Niri is so good. I've switched to using it about 5 months ago and it was legit the best computing decision I can remember making in recent history to move away from Windows.
I have a huge amount of gratitude towards the author of niri.
My dotfiles have always included an install script for setting everything up around command line tools, theme switching and more but it fully supports niri now too on Arch based distros https://github.com/nickjj/dotfiles in case anyone is shopping around for a new desktop environment and wants to get going quickly. I run it on both my main desktop and a travel laptop.
Same. I also find Niri paired with an ultrawide curved monitor to be particularly good.
Same². I started to regret having an ultrawide, until I discovered that it was made for Niri. I never loved my screen and linux as much as I do since Niri.
Yeah it is a dream on ultrawides. I was able to get a decent custom config with Qtile, but Niri is so much more natural. Being able to hit mod+c and center the current window is just so perfect on the ultrawide.
+1, ultrawide curved monitor user, used to be on sway but the experience of niri is next level.
Please take a look at Nirimod (unaffiliated, but it's awesome.)
If it helps get folks more comfortable configuring niri I'd say it's a win, but personally I'm happy with editing niri's config file directly.
Also, my dotfiles come with a custom Walker menu to find and search through niri key binds, selecting the key bind will run the action too.
With that said, if you're using my dotfiles and want to use this tool, it would be as simple as adding "nirimod-git" to the `PACKAGES_AUR_GUI_EXTRAS` variable in your config file.
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.
Yep, Hyprland recently added scrolling as a main line feature and since Omarchy is using Hyprland it can expose that feature.
I started with Hyprland when it didn't have scrolling built-in and all of the scrolling plugins were either really buggy or missing important features.
Ended up very quickly switching to niri and never looked back because I found it to be much more stable in general, plus niri handles multiple monitors in IMO the perfect way. niri is much different than Hyprland. It's not only about scrolling windows. It's how everything is put together and works together.
Niri introduced scroll-based window management to me and it instantly clicked. I'm very happy to see a full-on Niri per-workspace emulation mode in OmniWM[1] for the Mac, recently and thankfully made compatible with Sequoia. It immediately became my main window manager.
[1] https://github.com/BarutSRB/OmniWM
Paneru is a new thing for macOS made specifically to emulate niri.
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
If you are on a Mac, check out OmniWM, which has a Niri layout, in addition to one that's more like Hyprland. It has made my work on MacOS much more pleasant.
https://github.com/BarutSRB/OmniWM
I posted about it a bit ago when I just started using it, and it's been really great. Highly recommended.
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.
If that’s all it took to deter you that thoroughly, I think you can confidently say that you are outside of the target market. Which is 100% OK!
This is 100% visual software used for one of the most important functions of a computer: window management. I can't think of any software where it is more important that the demonstration video is good.
What else than a video would be suitable for demonstrating this software?
Transparent windows look really cool, but do people actually use that in day to day use? I guess I've got old man eyes or something.
I’ve been using the PaperWM extension for Gnome (that I believe Niri took inspiration from?), and it’s definitely an interesting way to work. I’m not sure that I love it, I feel like it’s a bit cumbersome when I have more than 3 windows in a single workspace.
But I’m giving it a real shot, and the nice thing about it being a Gnome extension is that the rest of the Gnome DE is right there without a ton of config.
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.
NGL, Claude has made this sort of thing so much easier. It used to take a very long time to get a WM just the way you wanted it, especially if you were using new tools you were unfamiliar with and weren't sure if they'd do what you wanted them to. Now it takes a few hours. There's value to learning to do it by hand...but honestly, when I've got everything set up I don't mess around with it much, and by the time I want to change something I have to relearn it all anyway. My setups aren't super complicated, just refined, so it's all pretty readily comprehensible.
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 gotten so used to the tiling WM workflow of quick-switching between a bunch of different dedicated fullscreen workspaces and managing windows with pure keyboard. Each workspace typically has a single app, or terminal with tmux, but occasionally I’ll split two apps side by side.
Would love to hear the perspective of anyone who switched from a similar workflow to Niri. How does the mental model shift?
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.
This is the way. I see so many people using tiling WMs that have dedicated workspaces per app, even worse, are all full screen. What is the point?
Being able to have one window of Firefox per project workspace, with only tabs relevant to that project - this alone is a better than the myriad of ways Firefox themselves have tried to solve it within the app.
The point is to dedicate maximum screen real estate to the primary thing you’re working on.
I tile within one monitor when I legitimately want to see things side by side, but I certainly don’t want firefox permanently taking up screen space when I really only need to occasionally look at it. Usually it’s on a separate monitor in the same workspace, or in a dedicated workspace.
Maybe there’s some way I could manipulate stacks and zooms to achieve that within one workspace, but I’ve always found it easier to just have firefox on a separate workspace I can easily quickly swap to and from when needed.
If you are trying to maximize screen real estate to the thing you are working on, why not just use a regular floating window manager will all the apps full screen? I don't see how that isn't equivalent. You can even use multiple workspaces with them too.
Because sometimes I do want multiple things on a screen, and in that case I want the windows to tile, not float?
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.
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.
Ah, an important detail is that I use 3 monitors.
Most workspaces are a fullscreen browser or some other app to the left, fullscreen editor in the center, tmux on the right.
I still use tiling within a monitor to view email side-by-side with browser, or a document or two side-by-side with code. Rarely feel the need to put 3+ apps in a complicated layout on one screen since I’m usually not gonna be cross-referencing at them all at once.
If I had one monitor I wouldn’t want to be taking up half of it showing the browser all the time when I could instead use that real estate for more vim splits.
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.
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
Related:
The dank case for scrolling window managers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46820468 - Jan 2026 (61 comments)
Niri 25.11 released with alt-tab and other improvements - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46097051 - Nov 2025 (1 comment)
Niri – A scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45461500 - Oct 2025 (229 comments)
The Future Is Niri - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43342178 - March 2025 (216 comments)
Niri: A scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37367687 - Sept 2023 (37 comments)
If anyone wants to try the NNN (Niri-Nix-Noctalia) dots. Feel free to use my flake, https://github.com/MostlyKIGuess/nix-flake-public.
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!
I was on the same boat as you. I installed noctalia after having tried and not really getting a perfect arch / niri / waybar setup.
I think I'm completely done after like 6 hours which is insanely fast, and it really is everything I ever wanted. It is cohesive, easy to style, has good defaults, includes essential programs like polkit agent and notification daemon / osd, has a ton of plugins.
I should have tried it so much sooner.
I was in the same boat, and I ended up running this: https://danklinux.com/
It works a charm.
There are a lot of them (like Celestia, DMS etc) and they look very good too. They are all based on QuickShell which provides the actual building blocks.
It does have it's own quirks, but it is quite nice and works out of the box. Really enjoy the sleek design.
I use mangowm on the wl-only branch(which is based on wlroots 0.20). It uses a lot less resources, has more layouts and I have fewer problems with it. Although niri seems to have more eye candy. It's definitely worth giving a try. If you want HDR, you have to wait though.
https://github.com/mangowm/mango
Fewer problems such as? For me niri has been rock solid.
Turns out a Russian prodigy can build something better than 100 million dollars worth of Claude tokens
Totally not mass psychosis guys pump the SPY
Actual prodigy though. Check out the release notes, they are a thing of beauty.
I agree that YalTer is a prodigy and that we are better off giving him a million dollars than spending 100 million on Claude Tokens
I switched to Niri at the end of last year after over a decade on i3.[1] Having horizontal scroll unbounded by my monitor size and workspace count unbound by the number of shortcut keys I have configured has been very freeing, and the graphical stuff is nice too.
My only remaining pain point is that its X compatibility layer, xwayland-satellite, does not yet support drag and drop between X and Wayland programs.[2]
[1]: https://davidyat.es/2026/01/28/niri/
[2]: https://github.com/Supreeeme/xwayland-satellite/issues/133
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.
I'd agree with sph about having one workspace per activity. I've never had a rigid workflow with lots of permanent named workspaces, but I have a workspace-naming script that lets me label my numbered workspaces after they've been set up.
Other things that help include a fuzzel-based open window searcher and, to be honest, restrained use of Niri's flagship scrolling feature. Most of my workspaces most of the time are the same size as my screen, with the scroll used very sparingly for usually temporary overflow.
I guess it also helps that I never used the i3 scratchpad so I don't miss it.
I mentioned elsewhere that scrolling WMs shine when you use a workspace per activity. You should never "have stuff all over the place", you should be working on a single one until you context switch.
For people that went from i3wm to Niri, I would love to be convinced.
Being a i3wm(now sway) user, I tried Niri but found the following points a little bit uncanny:
- (Cropping) Sometimes when I scroll by shifting focus, a little bit like 10% of the window I pushed to the left keeps appearing. I tried to configure Niri in such a way that never a tiny fraction of a window be cropped but couldn't manage. Not sure I missed some config though.
- (Scratchpads) No scratchpads. There's workaround that I saw using extension scripts, but felt cumbersome to use(not the script itself, I just wished it was native feature on Niri). I use scratchpads a lot for "global" apps like email, discord, obsidian so I can open them on any workspace I am at, then make them disappear completely after.
- (Spatial Memory) By being used to i3wm I am comfortable pushing different applications so they can fit on a single screen. In i3wm i have "perfect vision" of a workspace. Niri style keeps me "forgetting" what's to the left and right. I know I can zoom out, but feels like friction upon my short term memory.
I would love to receive any suggestion so I overcome these points that I stumbled upon. Soon I might be trying Niri again on a more work environment(my first try was on a PC connected to TV, so more media focused usage).
=== 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?
i3 shows title bars (shrinking or expanding them) kind of like how tabs are displayed in a web browser. If you do nested layouts with i3, though, you wont be able to see all the title bars, but otherwise usually you can see all the title bars (though truncated to fit). That's a pretty common workflow, and it gives you "perfect vision" of all the windows in that workspace. Vs niri which by default scrolls the whole window (title bar included) off the screen, so you can't see all the windows in the workspace at a glance.
I'm on hyprland (which also has a scrolling layout). How do you guys navigate between your workspaces? I'm accomodated to super+<num>, which jumps to workspace #<num> with a mostly fixed purpose. If I opened something ad-hoc, I usually know where I placed it. I found it difficult to operate in a setting which more resembles the state of my desk (if it weren't random access).
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).
I recently switched to niri after bouncing off it about a year ago, and this time it stuck.
One thing I learned in the process was that the custom wayland desktop world has the concept of a "desktop shell," which provides most or all of the additional components you might want on top of your compositor, rather than having to separately install a top bar, manage suspend/hibernate, figure out notifications, etc. You can of course still do all of that, but you can also just install niri and something like the "dank material shell"[0] and be off to the races. I first discovered this via awesome-niri[1].
The combination of niri and the shell means that the extent of my custom NixOS configuration for the two is entirely limited to keybindings and some custom window rules for zoom.
[0]: https://danklinux.com/
[1]: https://github.com/niri-wm/awesome-niri
Niri is really good. Very customizable. I do not think in terms of monitors anymore, just workspaces that are virtually infinite.
I used Niri on a Framework laptop a few months ago, and it was Okay. I don’t think it clicked with me/I’m not sure if I was using it right, but it was giving me a headache to mentally deal with spatially mapping all of my windows (I came from MacOS where I just knew which windows I had open and cmd+tab into the right one when needed)..
I think I would’ve adjusted best if I could somehow just watch someone do their daily work on Niri, to learn how to use it right. Curious if people who like Niri came from tiling WMs or standard DEs.
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:
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.
Slightly off topic: Does anyone know a window manager where you can map virtual desktops to real monitors? E.g. When I'm on the move I cycle through my virtual desktops on my laptop screen, but when connecting a monitor I want to cycle between my virtual desktops independently on either screen. While both screens share the same set of virtual desktops.
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.
Niri can even do one better: if you configure a keybind for the move-workspace-to-monitor-next or -prev actions you can move entire spaces between monitors, with wrap around. You can do the same for a column of windows (by default an individual window, but you can stack windows such that only one is visible in a group or that they're all visible in rows). I'll usually split my chat/monitoring spaces from my active development ones so I can passively refer back to them whilst working on an active task.
Niri offers a wonderful workflow; it really is an excellent piece of software.
Seems almost like what I want. It's a bit smarter too, I guess I'll give it a try:
> Each monitor contains an independent set of workspaces arranged vertically. [...] You can move a workspace to a different monitor [...]
> When you disconnect a monitor, its workspaces will automatically move to a different monitor. But, they will also "remember" their original monitor, so when you reconnect it, the workspaces will automatically move back to it.
https://niri-wm.github.io/niri/Workspaces.html#overview
I love niri. I'm half way through getting hdr rendering running
Niri is scrumptious UX. It's the future of desktop.
A few releases back when niri got "proper" Alt-Tab behavior like one expects from more mainline WMs made it pretty much perfect for me. Could not dream of wanting anything more than what it already has.
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
Another vote on niri being just great software. While itss idea (scrolling tiling windows manager) is novel, the software in itself is very polished with a very mature API that doesn't change at every version (looking at you hyprland).
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.
Give me Niri on macOS pleaaaaaase. I tried the variants but it’s not there yet, I want native trackpad gesture integration, either no animations or buttery smooth ones with full control, blur please, and everything else.
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.
No, they don't, but I'd still take OmniWM over not having it.
Fair point, in my case I also have multiple monitors and support for these is notoriously bad in these variants so I rather suffer without it
Slightly offtopic and it's odd because I'm asking for something that feels like should exist though, like, I get that I have no right to it.
This, for X, but not under Gnome or KDE? Even better, perhaps as just a script or something under Openbox?
(might be time to get into the vibecoding...)
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
I teach online and Zoom + screen sharing on Wayland is just not there yet.
Using Niri for over a year now.
Before that I was on sway for 6 years, before that on i3, before that on KDE, Gnome, ...
I'll never look back.
Niri is the best window manager I ever used, it just instantly clicked with me.
I use hyprland. And I navigate with ALT+? commands for the main apps I use, and alt+tab strictly to go back to previous workspace. I also have a task bar that I can also click to navigate when I need (on waybar). I love it. I'm never in some intermediate state like a view of all my workspaces, or holding alt tab to choose some workspace - it's always a single hotkey stroke. I also have 3 special workspaces that use alt+scroll-up/scroll-down/middle-mouse-button-click, for my password manager, my dashboard, and my music (strawberry).
I encourage everyone using the ubuntu/windows paradigm to check this out instead. Windows users see me working and their jaws drop, because it's so fast and smooth.
If anyone's curious I use ALT+: e for file manager (thunar), w for chrome, a for whatsapp, x for terminal, c for claude web, y for youtube, n for a notepad-style program, d for launcher (fuzzel), t for sublime, z for emacs, v for clipboard history, f for full screen, q to kill active and f1 for a emacs capture-dialog. g sends a window to a ws on my main monitor, and alt+shift+g sends it to secondary monitor.
This sounds very interesting. I'm currently in the middle of revisiting my desktop setup and interaction style. Landed on Qtile/Wayland but now I'm starting to notice lag.
> Every monitor has its own separate window strip. Windows can never "overflow" onto an adjacent monitor
I'm someone who was very content with the constraint of a laptop (one single screen, generally running one maximized window per workspace and switching with F-keys), but has never really become comfortable with multi-monitors. Can anyone explain why window managers always default to treating individual monitors as completely separate entities rather than one larger screen that works together? Like I would have thought the default here would be to have two monitors operate on the same horizontally-scrolling set of windows. Either tied together, or as independent viewports. But everybody always seems to reach towards treating each monitor as having disjoint windows. Which I guess I can get used to, it just seems odd?