6 ms·

The Future Is Niri

423 points by mattjhall 2y ago

z0r 2y ago
I enjoyed this post but I'm going to keep using xmonad (and X) until I can port my configuration to a wayland equivalent (if that is even possible)
qalmakka 2y ago
I just can't wrap my head around tiling WMs (and I've been doing Linux since a _long_ time ago). I just don't see how usable they can be when you have a "small" screen to be honest.
- aarroyoc 2y ago
  I use Niri at home and PaperWM at work but I use most apps maximized. The thing that I like is that I can move between windows in a WASD like shortcut, more convenient that doing Alt-Tab. However vertical split is also very easy to do in Niri and it's sometimes very convenient.
  - broken-kebab 2y ago
    But keyboard-driven workflow is not a property of tiling WMs. You can re-configure window switching in many WMs to be whatever you like
- darthrupert 2y ago
  Vice versa for me: I cannot understand how people with small screens can use anything but tiling.
- riquito 2y ago
  More often than not you keep just one or two windows visible in the screen, and switch to another app with <super>+<number> or similar. Since you use most apps fullscreen, the small screen doesn't feel so small anymore. Feels good, honestly
- thesuitonym 2y ago
  That's cool, homie, maybe it's just not for you. Personally, while I understand the appeal, it's just not for me.
  - broken-kebab 2y ago
    Frankly, mate, the answer is a bit too hipsterish. Of "you won't understand true underground anyway" sort. We're talking about productivity tools, if there are advantages they can be described even if subjectively.
    - thesuitonym 2y ago
      Sometimes people just like things. It's not all about productivity.
- thom 2y ago
  Lots of tasks involve two different apps (googling a bug while looking at the error, reading a spec while working on the code, being on a call while showing off a document etc). I'm almost always happier with two full monitors, but I use tiling when I'm stuck on a single laptop screen for example. I rarely want more than two things at once unless I'm in Emacs, and I sometimes get the sense that a lot of tiling window manager and tmux use is just people not knowing how to use their editor's built in window management and multi-process support. Obviously everyone's free to build their own environment however they like, I don't know why anyone would accept being stuck on a tiny screen for long periods though!
- mmgutz 2y ago
  Tilers can remove Gnome's overly whitespaced decorations, probably saving 10% in screen pixels alone. If you want to maximize all windows on run, niri can do that with a rule. It then becomes like a monocle layout where you can use swipes/keyboard/scroll wheel to navigate between maximized windows. I don't know of any DE that will run all windows maximized by default. Too bad I no longer have an 800x600 netbook. Niri would be perfect for it.
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evanjrowley 2y ago
I've never tried Niri, but I'm interested. Recently I had a good introduction to the scrollable WM experience on GNOME with the PaperWM extension: https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM
- 20after4 2y ago
  Niri is inspired by paperWM and it’s so much smoother. If you liked PaperWM then niri might be worth a look. It does suffer a bit because it’s not built within the gnome environment. So niri is missing a few things that gnome provides “for free.” Niri leaves it up to you find replacements for some pretty basic functionality. Some things it seems to be missing: - Desktop notifications - App launcher - dock or any sort of list of running apps. - Xwayland (for seamlessly running x11 applications) All of these functions must be provided by other separate tools that are not included with niri. My biggest complaint is the lack of clipboard synchronization between x11 and Wayland. I guess that gnome handles this automatically but it’s not so in niri - Wayland apps have independent clipboard and inability copy paste between Wayland and x11 is very annoying. There are workarounds but none that I’ve tried so far are satisfactorily convenient and reliable.
  - yencabulator 2y ago
    I personally consider GNOME to be much more suffering... xwayland-satellite gives you XWayland without needing compositor integration.
    - 20after4 2y ago
      Xwayland-satellite does work quitw well in most regards, however I still haven’t fully solved the clipboard sync issue. I’ve got a hack involving wl-copy piped to xclip that mostly works but sometimes it just stops working for no apparent reason. Or I wind up with multiple copies of xclip running and I have to clean it up. I wish there was a clean way to make the few x apps play nice with Wayland that doesn’t require jumping through weird hoops. Although it hasn’t driven me back to gnome (yet). Hot take: the way clipboard functionality is implemented seems pretty “odd” to me, especiallly on Unix but some of the legacy probably goes all the way back to old school Mac OS or maybe even to xerox parc. In modern times, Neither Xwindows nor Wayland have done a lot to fix past mistakes. Wayland has done a lot, however, to expose the weaknesses in a very antiquated design.
arghwhat 2y ago
Niri is cool, but was the drag issue reported? :/ sway 1.10 is from october, 1.10.1 is a bugfix from late january. Since they're talking about git bisect, I imagine they might be running master (i.e., bleeding edge) instead of stable releases...
- freedomben 2y ago
  They did mention that they asked for help in IRC. Not the same thing as a bug report of course, but worth mentioning.
  - arghwhat 2y ago
    Yeah that's fair, but a lot of people are quite... impatient on IRC, ignoring that those able to answer might be busy or in a different timezone altogether. Debugging an issue requires at the very least the effort to reproduce it, and if the person doesn't already bring a trivial reproduction this can at times be a painful and time-consuming project to extract, and that time is not always available right at that instant. Coming in with a prepared and easy reproduction and a filed issue makes quite a difference in the response you'll get. (For the record, I don't experience anything matching what they describe on master right now, but the post was more about PaperWM vs. tiling UX so that doesn't matter that much.)
xpe 2y ago
A fun read. Everyone has their breaking point… > Naturally, instead of figuring out what library made a breaking change and spending four hours running git bisect, I decided to throw nearly a decade of muscle-memory and workflow refinements out the window.
bilekas 2y ago
> The worst "street-cred" I have is that I've been using tiling window managers for thirty-five percent of my life: five years with Sway and two with i3. As the realization of those numbers (and my age) dawns upon me The author is ~21 and seems worried they're old ? I had a good giggle about that.. And then it dawned upon me how old I actually am.
- deleted 2y ago
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- kisonecat 2y ago
  As a 40-something year old person who used ratpoison more than 21 years ago... Yeah, I feel super old now.
  - vinceguidry 2y ago
    Man I miss those days. I felt so cool sitting in coffee shops with a 10 year old ThinkPad running ratpoison on Gentoo.
    - int_19h 2y ago
      Ratpoison is surprisingly good on small laptops, where everything is usually maximized anyway.
    - dimatura 2y ago
      A nice side benefit is that ratpoison is its own screen lock (for 99% of people).
  - celsius1414 2y ago
    No need to feel super old! /cries in half century Reminds me of that explanation for why the years seem to move much faster when you’re older. When you’re 10, five years is half your life. When you’re 50, it’s only 10%.
  - dimatura 2y ago
    I still use ratpoison, dreading the day it stops working for whatever reason (wayland being a likely one). Haven't tried it, but Cagebreak (https://github.com/project-repo/cagebreak https://github.com/project-repo/cagebreak) seems like a possible successor.
andrewla 2y ago
This looks really intriguing and I'm looking forward to using it. I'm still using i3, which is just barely good enough to work. I miss Notion, which was unfortunately too flakey and unstable to continue using, but that had one property which it looks like Niri preserves -- opening a new window will never cause a resize event. Notion is perhaps even stronger because there is no infinite canvas; opening a new window will never cause a re-layout. It will always open in a tab or a blank space. Similarly, moving windows won't cause re-layout actions; it will just move them between tabs of existing frames. My i3 configuration tried to preserve this -- it tries to make everything tabbed by default so that moving windows will just move between tabs rather than into new blanks spaces and cause a relayout action, but sometimes, for some reason, it just ... does not, and instead opens a new split. I tried to make xmonad work but I'm not good enough at Haskell to figure out if it was even possible to configure it the way I want.
the_gipsy 2y ago
I would like to know, coming from a traditional tiling window manager, how does the shortcut workflow look like? For me the number one thing is having fixed shortcuts á la Super+[0-9] to go to specific windows / workspaces / essentially a specific program. If I can have that, and additionally solving the "worskpace management" problem as TFA described, I'm sold! Does it make sense to use "workspaces" like this with Niri? For example, one workspace with the browser, one with the editor, one with several terminal columns, and so on. I would need to "switch" (immediately, without animation effects, please) e.g. from "browser" to "terminals".
- tripdout 2y ago
  Yes, Niri still supports numbered workspaces in the same was as WMs like Sway. It's just that now you can scroll them horizontally too.
  - stevefolta 2y ago
    The one caveat -- and it's a big one -- is that Niri numbers workspaces dynamically, and won't let you have an empty workspace (except temporarily).
    - rwdf 2y ago
      You can have named workspaces now, I have ones dedicated to terminals, and browsers. They always have the same numbers.
      - stevefolta 2y ago
        Oh, perfect, thanks! I've been using Niri for less than a week, hadn't got to using named workspaces yet, and missed the bit in the docs where it says they can be empty.
  - the_gipsy 2y ago
    I tried it and I'm completely sold!
- 2y ago
bsnnkv 2y ago
Unfortunately tiling window managers for Linux have become quite stagnant in terms of improving and iterating on workflows, which is probably why we're seeing more of the kind of sentiment expressed in this post lately (of course, the poor backwards compatibility story is not helping either) The Windows scene is definitely the place where the most interesting workflow advances in "traditional" tiling window managers are happening right now.
- pona-a 2y ago
  Can you point to any innovative Windows tiling WMs and explain what "workflow advances" it makes? All I found was FancyWM, and it seems basically identical to i3.
  - bsnnkv 2y ago
    I'm on a phone for most of today so I won't be making the kind of lengthy reply you're asking for, but you can check out komorebi and jwno if you're genuinely interested
    - slightwinder 2y ago
      I don't see any real innovation with those WM. It looks like they are just migrating the features of advanced Linux-WMs to the windows-world, in their own way. Can you name any specific features you are considering as innovative?
      - bsnnkv 2y ago
        The main ones that I'm still waiting to see integrated into mainstream Linux twms are workspace scrolling (of course), dynamic layout rules and dynamic offset rules (important for ultrawide monitor users). I'd also like to see container limit rules to enforce stacking after meeting a threshold (functions as a hard cap on tiles-per-workspace), and native support for Vimium-style shortcuts for every UI element on the screen (from jwno), but I could probably live without these. I wouldn't call these particularly innovative features, in fact they are pretty low hanging fruit.
strobe 2y ago
I thought moving from i3/x11 to sway/wayland but from this post is looks like screen sharing still not resolved yet completely on wayland. How much time is worth to wait until UX with wayland will be good enough to not worry about that kind stuff?
- Propelloni 2y ago
  I can't say how much time it is worth to you, sorry. What I can say is that screen sharing works fine under Wayland and Gnome for me (AMD hardware all the way), so I'm inclined to say that Wayland is not the showstopper here.
  - freedomben 2y ago
    Same. Screensharing under Wayland/Gnome with AMD hardware all the way has been working great for quite some time
  - strobe 2y ago
    thanks, good to know. anyway, if one of the majors tiling wm managers struggling to share specific window it looks like it could be more edge cases like that. Probably, I can deal with those things but I fully understand struggle of this article author so just wanna upgrade to it when possibility of struggle will be minimal for me.
drcongo 2y ago
That video immediately made me wish this was available for Mac, it seemed to fit my brain's model of how things should be.
- 256 2y ago
  there's https://github.com/mogenson/PaperWM.spoon https://github.com/mogenson/PaperWM.spoon (i haven't tried it)
- loveiswork 2y ago
  It's not quite the same as Niri, but in case you haven't seen there is _A_ tiling window manager for Mac: Amethyst No 'endless scrolling' aspect, but I find it works great for managing window sizing and bopping around your windows via keyboard.
- incanus77 2y ago
  Check out AeroSpace. It’s pretty amazing. I’m wondering if it can be made to do things like Niri. https://github.com/nikitabobko/AeroSpace https://github.com/nikitabobko/AeroSpace
  - OsrsNeedsf2P 2y ago
    After hopping around MacOS window managers, I landed on Aerospace. For MacOS it's by far the best, and can do most of the things I want. But it still feels like a plastic fork and knife compared to Niri. Really wish Apple would open up more of their desktop APIs..
  - timeon 2y ago
    Does anybody have experience comparing it with Yabai?
    - incanus77 2y ago
      I only tried out Yabai once I discovered AeroSpace in order to compare. I immediately appreciated AeroSpace's take on just completely sidestepping MacOS spaces.
ollybee 2y ago
I've been using sway daily since before it was really stable and recently tried Niri but maybe couldn't get over the muscle memory from sway. I use sway mostly in tabbed mode anyway which gives a similar feel to a scrolling WM but with flexibility to break out to tiles in a different workspace if needed. What has massively improved my workflow recently is vertical tabs in Firefox. I now have browser tabs I can cycle up and down through on side of my screen, and application tabs I can cycle through left and right at the top. I love it.
cafeinux 2y ago
This seems interesting. I've been thinking lately of re-installing a tilling WM on my daily driver because I have a wide screen and I spend more time rearranging and searching for windows than doing actual things on it. Also, it seems that all that screen estate could be put to better use with a tilling WM. Guess I'll give Niri a try, maybe it will fit my needs.
kemaru 2y ago
It wasn't a good fit for me. The strip of windows extending past the border of my screen, sometimes showing half a window, triggered a weird anxiety, it kept drawing my attention. I used it for about two months and then ditched it for a more traditional tiling compositor (hyprland) where windows don't overlap the screen border. Niri is, however, very pretty from a technical standpoint. Modern Rust codebase, good code structure, very easy to understand and start hacking.
- pmarreck 2y ago
  would a widescreen make this better or worse? (I like to work in UWQHD.)
- yencabulator 2y ago
  I set my column widths so there's really never a partial window at the edge. On laptop, it's either full width or 1/2 widths depending on the task, on the ultrawide it's 1/3rd width or full width for editor with internal column splits.
cnqso 2y ago
I'm a hyprland zoomer but I used Niri for a bit and it worked pretty well. It slots in perfectly for someone coming from an average single-monitor Windows workflow (for most office-style tasks). I still think that more complex tiling setups have a higher productivity ceiling though. I guess if you're like this guy and keep >10 workspaces open at once you'd have to go with Niri. I wonder if the increased battery life would still hold for someone that only keeps a few windows open at once. 2 hours is insane from just a change of wm
- ffaser5gxlsll 2y ago
  I'm still cycling through wayland and x11, and I also do get 1.5 hours more runtime on average on my old 2nd gen t14s with x11+xmonad+no compositor. It's one of the main reasons I'm struggling to move permanently, as I really don't see any advantage from my perspective as I don't use any desktop environment or feature that would make a compositor actually useful. The only thing I do notice occasionally are black borders due to shadow dropdowns in gtk4 programs that don't respect the system theme I've set.
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BirAdam 2y ago
Having heard about Niri previously, I really didn't like the sound of it. Seeing the movement with hotkeys shown with each movement... well... that completely changed my perspective. I will have to give it a try.
- TylerE 2y ago
  Funny, I'm the opposite. The idea is intriguing, but I absolutely do not want animated. I have vision issues and animation just makes everything go (more) blurry.
  - wging 2y ago
    There's apparently a config setting to turn all animations off, though I haven't tried it myself. The author linked their config file from the article, and it includes this: // Animation settings. animations { // Uncomment to turn off all animations. // off I think it's boilerplate from the default config file, which would imply that the video they showed is not the 'animations off' version, if that's not already clear from the presence of animations.
  - the_gipsy 2y ago
    You can entirely turn off all animations. You can also turn off only some, like workspace switching, and reduce the durations globally.
dkersten 2y ago
This looks interesting and I’ll probably give it a try. I’ve been using Sway for the last five years and i3 for a few years previously. They work fairly well for me, I certainly didn’t have any of the problems the OP mentioned. My all time favourite window manager, though, and one I wish would be revived (perhaps as a wayland WM now. How I wish I had the free time to take this on…) is GOOMWWM which I used for a decade prior to i3 (and Musca before that).
tycho-newman 2y ago
When I was in my 20s, I was all in on Compiz. Whatever happened to it?
- onli 2y ago
  There were some forks and merges already back then that probably did not help. Then Canoncial hired the main dev, with the main project not surviving far beyond his later departure. Official end point for the project seems to have been https://www.phoronix.com/news/MTI2ODU https://www.phoronix.com/news/MTI2ODU, in 2012 and mentioning Wayland as reason (as if that were anywhere close back then). But actually, the launchpad repo has recent commits (or do I read https://code.launchpad.net/~compiz-team/compiz/+git/compiz/+ref/master https://code.launchpad.net/~compiz-team/compiz/+git/compiz/+... wrong), and so does https://github.com/compiz-reloaded https://github.com/compiz-reloaded. You can still just use one of those if you want - Void Linux for example has it packaged, and so does Ubuntu.
- film42 2y ago
  It's still around but not in active development. Tiling window managers like i3 are just a window manager, but you can add compiz as your compositor to wobble if you want. I think compton is still the most popular "just good enough" compositor used by i3 users (it's what I use). Sway is both a compositor and a window manager.
- haswell 2y ago
  Worth mentioning that https://wayfire.org/ https://wayfire.org/ is a spiritual successor that runs in Wayland.
- imp0cat 2y ago
  Well I have some great news for you if you're running plain Gnome today. You need this! https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/4679/burn-my-windows/ https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/4679/burn-my-windows/
discardedrefuse 2y ago
KDE users might be interested in Karousel. A Kwin script that also does scrollable tiling windows in KDE. https://github.com/peterfajdiga/karousel https://github.com/peterfajdiga/karousel
- kelvie 2y ago
  I've use it daily since the whole hyprland toxicity thing. It works amazing for my workflow, but there are a ton of wrinkles if you stray off the happy path, but it works great (for me). I also only use a single monitor, trying to plug a second monitor in makes it work less than ideally, and I really wish there was drag + drop support like most other tilers, but for me it's not worth giving up the rest of KDE.
DarkCrusader2 2y ago
Does anyone know the best way to get some tiling behavior in tradition DEs like Cinnamon. Some basic things like notifications, keyboard controls for volume/brightness, sound etc don't work the best in i3wm by default and requires some fiddling on each machine to get it to work properly. I love the out of the box behavior of my Mint installation and don't want to switch completely to something like i3wm. I could get even a watered down version tiling and stacking like i3 with keyboard shortcuts, I would be very happy. There is gTile but it doesn't quite work the same way.
- dingnuts 2y ago
  Not sure about Cinnamon, which is a pet project by Linux Mint, but Gnome and Kwin offer some options these days: https://github.com/ellysaurus/KWin-TilingGuide/ https://github.com/ellysaurus/KWin-TilingGuide/ https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM https://github.com/peterfajdiga/karousel https://github.com/peterfajdiga/karousel there might be more
Starlevel004 2y ago
I tried using Niri but the per-monitor workspace behaviour is completely unacceptable to me. I don't use a laptop.
- anarcat 2y ago
  can you expand on that? how does it compare to sway, for example? what's unacceptable and acceptable for you?
  - Starlevel004 2y ago
    Sway (and most other tiling) WMs have the same behaviour; i.e., each monitor has its own unique set of workspaces instead of one workspace being shared across monitors. Workspaces not being persistent also messed with me, I have eight workspaces all divvied up for exact purposes and sometimes the ones inbetween are empty. I use labwc currently which has the ideal workspace behaviour (one workspace shared).
    - anarcat 2y ago
      right, those are the two ways. and how does niri do it? a workspace is shared among all monitor, or it's one workspace per monitor?
- MyOutfitIsVague 2y ago
  This is interesting and subjective. A shared workspace is completely unacceptable to me. I need my monitors to have different, unlinked workspaces that can be independently switched. It's one of the things I hated about using Gnome.
ahub 2y ago
Coming from the same background as the author and about checks notes 15 years older (ouch), I loved Niri very much. However I never managed to make x11 windows behave correctly. At the moment the solutions are a bit cumbersome [0] and I didn't manage to have a smooth experience so far... [0] https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/wiki/Xwayland https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/wiki/Xwayland
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
  I don't have a lot of practice with it, but what problems did you have with xwayland-satellite? It really seems like you just run it and everything magically works
jackbravo 2y ago
Is there something equivalent or similar for MacOS? This seems great! I use (and pay) for the magnet app, I don't like the native fullscreen functionality or split screen options.
- jackbravo 2y ago
  Ha! The niri README has an answer for this, https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri, it is https://github.com/mogenson/PaperWM.spoon https://github.com/mogenson/PaperWM.spoon, "Tiled scrollable window manager for MacOS".
  - phildenhoff 2y ago
    Thanks! As soon as I saw Niri I wondered if there was a macOS alternative. Aerospace has a similar resizing glitch as PaperWM.spoon: resizing one direction ends up looking wonky if you do it fast enough. It’s noticeable at the end of the smooth scrolling demo. That must be a macOS thing… I may check out PaperWM.spoon at some point but realistically I’ll set up a VM and try out Niri
mrbluecoat 2y ago
I think the post should be retitled "The Future Is Niri [for people who never touch their mouse and instead like memorizing keyboard shortcuts]" (watch the bottom-right readout on the video)
- yencabulator 2y ago
  I use Niri largely by touchpad gestures.
dhrm1k 2y ago
funny I got to know about ersei from Purdue linux group's members list and here he is on the frontpage of hn.
sunshine-o 2y ago
Scrollable WMs are really terrific because you get about 80% of the productivity benefits of a tiling WM with 20% of the effort. I am puzzeled by the fact it took us 30-40 years to figure it out !
- alabastervlog 2y ago
  I watched the video on the site and this looks like absolute hell, as someone who uses drag-n-drop between programs fairly often. I'm also someone whose open browser tabs tend to grow indefinitely until I just have to bookmark and close all hundred of them or whatever, so... yeah, this entire paradigm looks extremely not for me.
  - sunshine-o 2y ago
    > this looks like absolute hell, as someone who uses drag-n-drop between programs fairly often The way people use it is you constantly reorder windows according to your workflow so DnD is not a problem. > I'm also someone whose open browser tabs tend to grow indefinitely until I just have to bookmark and close all hundred of them or whatever I agree the tab model is an horror. The problem is for most people the tabs are their browsing history, with a visual clutter. My guess is there is an huge opportunity for rethinking the whole web browser history/tab model.
    - sureglymop 2y ago
      Another thing I hate especially in firefox is that one can't pin tabs on the right, next to the newest tabs and the new tabs button. So often one has to keep one or two tabs open but otherwise open many new ones to research something.
  - muixoozie 2y ago
    > I'm also someone whose open browser tabs tend to grow indefinitely until I just have to bookmark and close all hundred of them or whatever, so... You might like the tabstash browser extension
- 2y ago
tasuki 2y ago
I use Gnome and basically full-screen all my windows. Sometimes I use win+left/right to create a half-width window. Am I a caveman?
- bootsmann 2y ago
  I use this too, the keybinds carry to windows which is very convenient. I get stunlocked by muscle memory when working in macos tho.
  - tiagod 2y ago
    Try out Rectangle. You can set keybinds to match what you're used to.
- alabastervlog 2y ago
  I'll occasionally do quarters. Especially half on one side, two quarter-windows on the other, for a 3-window arrangement. On Mac. My key bindings are a little different because I use the defaults in Spectacle to do it. More than a decade like that. Program's discontinued but still works and has never given me so much as one problem this entire time, so I'm going to keep using it until it stops working.
  - kingnothing 2y ago
    Tiling is now built in to MacOS if you want to give that a try: https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/mac-window-tiling-icons-keyboard-shortcuts-mchl9674d0b0/mac https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/mac-window-tiling-i...
    - alabastervlog 2y ago
      Yeah, I haven't seen a way to change the keybindings so they match my muscle memory. My current set-up is "brew install spectacle", cmd+space+"spect"+return, tick the checkbox to run at startup, then never think about it again—even if there were a way, I'd also have to go to the trouble of scripting the keybinding changes to make it this easy.
maelito 2y ago
My biggest problem with wayland was support for french characters. So annoying, so basic. L'accent circonflexe ne marchait pas. Last time I tried, a few weeks ago, it wasn't better.
- gautamcgoel 2y ago
  Just out of curiosity, what issues do you encounter? Doesn't Wayland support Unicode?
- the_gipsy 2y ago
  You can use basically the same old xkb configs as with xorg. I have some hacked together keyboard layout in an xkb file, that I share across tty / xorg / wayland.
flkiwi 2y ago
I tried to use niri, but I couldn't get it working on NixOS. That is almost certainly user error on my part, but, as a devoted paperwm user in my gnome days, I'm very much on board with what niri is offering. And since this is a discussion of linux window managers: Currently I'm using hyprland, which is great, but the one I really want to keep maturing is river. It's a very sensible WM that is nonetheless not completely hostile to fun like at least one wayland WM I'm not going to name.
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
  > I tried to use niri, but I couldn't get it working on NixOS. Couldn't get what to work? Like, you switch to a VT, run nix-shell -p niri niri and it crashes, or...?
  - flkiwi 2y ago
    There was, at the time, some sort of issue with the flake. So, really, I couldn't get it running with flakes. I should really try it again.
- bulatb 2y ago
  > That is almost certainly user error on my part If an interested and reasonably savvy person can't get a program to work as it claims, the problem is the program, not the user.
  - hackeraccount 2y ago
    That's what someone who's been working in IT for either a day or 20 years says.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
- yencabulator 2y ago
  Works just fine here. There was a time when there was something wrong with the graphics stack and it crashed on start, but it runs just fine now. NixOS 24.11, launching it from getty with environment.loginShellInit = '' if [ "$(tty)" == /dev/tty1 -a "$USER" != "root" ]; then exec systemd-cat -t niri niri --session fi '';
sroussey 2y ago
This looks like some headset UI designs to me. Viture comes to mind.
haswell 2y ago
I love the idea of tiling window managers and I've done reasonably long stints with i3 and hyprland, but for some reason, I've always struggled to fully stick with them and have fallen back to Xfce (old habits die hard). I think what always ends the experiment is that once I reach a certain number of windows, it can be more challenging to manage them if you haven't gone deep enough down the rabbit hole to properly configure workspaces, layouts, etc. I just fired up Niri, and in 10 minutes I already feel more comfortable than I have with other tiling window managers. It feels immediately intuitive, and the mouse integration is excellent. Maybe it's too early to declare victory, but this really truly looks like exactly what I've been wanting/needing for years. I'll judge how good it is by how long it takes me to think about going back to Xfce ;)
- cosmic_cheese 2y ago
  Tiling never worked for me either. Might be because the place I use Linux most is on laptops, where screens are too small to do much tiling aside from maybe splitting the screen in half (and even that doesn’t play nice with things like IDEs). Plain, boring, non-trendy floating WMs/DEs with some lightweight optional tiling has proven most optimal for me.
  - lll-o-lll 2y ago
    It’s on laptops where I appreciate tiling the most. Simple hotkey switching between apps (workspaces) is much better than mouse over some taskbar or alt tab tab tab tab.
    - 75902846575 2y ago
      There are floating WMs with multiple workspaces you can switch between with hotkeys. It's not a feature exclusive to tiling WMs.
      - yencabulator 2y ago
        With the tiling WM, you spend essentially no time arranging windows, they're all just laptop-screen-filling. On the ultrawide they're all 1/3rd of screen which is the perfect for that monitor size. I haven't clicked a single maximize button in a decade or so.
jdiez17 2y ago
I’m also a long time i3/sway user and find Niri quite comfy. I can carry over most of my muscle memory from sway for navigating the focus, moving windows etc. I’ve also found it to be very stable and works out of the box with xwayland-satellite. My biggest issue is that I keep “losing” windows. I open them in a deeply nested stack, do something else and forgot I already had opened the window. It also happens with sway to some extent but it’s a lot easier to scroll through all workspaces. It would be nice to have something like a “window map” bound to Alt-Tab.
- presto8 2y ago
  Would alttab meet your needs? I've been using it with xmonad and it works well. https://github.com/sagb/alttab https://github.com/sagb/alttab
  - jdiez17 2y ago
    That seems to be X11 only, so not really. It should also be workspace-aware.
- cycomanic 2y ago
  Hyprscroller (a hyprland plugin with similar functionality as niri) has an "expose" type function. I tend to forget it's there though.
- boomskats 2y ago
  You talking about something like the issue I linked to earlier? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43347909 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43347909 FWIW I've got a niri IPC / bash / jq abomination that emulates run-or-raise functionality and works probably better than the original RoR. It cycles through windows matching a particular appId and starts one if one doesn't already exist. That, alongside rofi(wayland) as a fuzzy search nav for all open windows, made a huge difference to me.
  - jdiez17 2y ago
    Yep, that's exactly what I'm looking for. Your bash script is far less of an abomination than what you made it sound like :)
specproc 2y ago
I can recommend trying out any non-standard WM to anyone looking to learn more about what's going on with a Linux desktop. I learned more about Linux playing around with TWMs than any other class of software. I don't know if it's really made me any more productive, but it's a fantastic learning experience, the ergonomics are great, and there's incredible satisfaction in building your own desktop environment from the ground up.
- freedomben 2y ago
  What are some of the most interesting WMs in your opinion?
  - thugcee 2y ago
    For X11: Binary Space Partitioning WM https://github.com/baskerville/bspwm https://github.com/baskerville/bspwm
  - PuercoPop 2y ago
    wmii[0], it implements the acme window layout. But the interesting part is that it exposes its state as a file-system. The main loop is a shell script[1]. So BYO posible, fe here is a Ruby one [2] [0]: https://github.com/0intro/wmii https://github.com/0intro/wmii [1]: https://github.com/0intro/wmii/blob/main/cmd/wmii.rc.rc https://github.com/0intro/wmii/blob/main/cmd/wmii.rc.rc [2]: https://github.com/sunaku/wmiirc https://github.com/sunaku/wmiirc
  - specproc 2y ago
    I don't know about interesting, I think Niri from the parent looks like something I'd like to try. I've used i3 and moved to hyprland (because it's pretty). From the perspective I was coming from, I don't think it matters that much, you'll run into the same issues with any of them. It's about understanding all the things Gnome/KDE/Xfce etc do for you, and how you can set that up differently yourself using components of your choice.
PixelForg 2y ago
I was interested in Niri until I saw that it had the same issue that other wayland compositors have (except Gnome and KDE) i.e xwayland scaling > Display scaling (integer or fractional) will make X11 apps look blurry; this needs to be supported in xwayland-satellite.
ge96 2y ago
where's i3 gaps and the ricing
crabbone 2y ago
I use stumpwm. The reason is to have fewer features. In the few years I've used it, I never wanted to select text with mouse (although sometimes I had no choice, eg. in PDF), but even then, I never wanted to drag it with the mouse (and I never needed to do that). I don't even know if that would work, and even if it doesn't--wouldn't care... If I didn't need a Web browser and a PDF reader I wouldn't be running X at all... I wish there was a usable alternative for the browser and PDF reader that didn't require X...
WeZzyNL 2y ago
It's X11 but whenever (tiling) window managers are mentioned, I feel a strong urge to mention Herbstluftwm [0]. It's more manual than the automatic splitting most tiling WMs do but I really enjoy how easy it is to split/tab using the keyboard in Herbstluftwm. [0] https://herbstluftwm.org/ https://herbstluftwm.org/
cmrdporcupine 2y ago
How did we get to a place where a major popular piece of software like this will provide binary packaging for basically every distribution other than Debian (and, by extension, Ubuntu)? This feels out of step with the last 30 years of Linux software development... These are very popular distributions...
eximius 2y ago
Glad to see Smithay has approached a point that lots of things are being built on it. Last I really deeply looked at all this was when Way Cooler abandoned wlroots-rs. And to my pleasant surprise, it seems like there may finally be an AwesomeWM alternative for Wayland now! (Pinnacle)
Ferret7446 2y ago
I think i3/sway has deceived a lot of people into thinking that tiling means manual tiling. Having to manually split and arrange your windows is not how tiling is supposed to work.
- pkulak 2y ago
  I switched from Sway to River and have been very happy. However, I noticed Niri when it came out, and was extremely intrigued. Haven't check back in since, but it looks like the project is still humming along, which is awesome. I may have to check it out.
- koiueo 2y ago
  Deceived? I knew I prefer manual tiling since the very moment I tried wmii. It was the first time tiling made sense to me, and it was a major productivity booster on my 12" laptop. On such small screen I can't care less about all those spiral, bsp and other tiling schemes automatic twms offer.
boomskats 2y ago
The _only_ thing I feel Niri still needs is this: https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/discussions/352#discussioncomment-10094739 https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/discussions/352#discussioncom... Otherwise it is the perfect endgame UX for me. Regardless of screen size or form factor. I never thought I'd find something that I liked better than i3/sway, but those subtle niri animations, at double speed? On a high refresh rate monitor, w/ amdgpu? Ahh. Chef's kiss <3
mmgutz 2y ago
Niri is RAM efficient. I run Niri in an 8GB VM on Intel Macbook, and on a $99 8GB mini PC. Total RAM usage on boot is less than 400MB with waybar, polkit, ssh-agent, mako ... That's in the ultra lightweight WM category. Compare that to Gnome+paperwm (1.6GB) There are features Niri sorely needs: 1) 2D overview (zoom in/out), 2) enhanced meta for windows (to create window indicator [1] and window picker)
- 75902846575 2y ago
  We're calling 400MB RAM usage ultra-lightweight now? OpenBox needs 7MB of RAM, and there are WMs that are even lighter on memory requirements. > Compare that to Gnome+paperwm (1.6GB) Anything seems lightweight if you compare it to a DE well known for its bloat.
  - mmgutz 2y ago
    Niri doesn't use 400MB by itself, that's the entire memory footprint of everything running. In comparison, OpenBox with all the utilities needed for wallet, ssh agent etc is in the 450MB range on my box. That's probably due X11 vs Wayland. A minimal Niri functional environment is similar to IceWM in RAM usage. I used to run antiX in VMs.
  - arp242 2y ago
    > We're calling 400MB RAM usage ultra-lightweight now? OpenBox needs 7MB of RAM, and there are WMs that are even lighter on memory requirements. My WM uses 1,158K of RAM, or basically just a bit above 1M. This is a very minimal custom thing I wrote years ago that works for me. But the previous person said "total RAM usage on boot". I was curious enough to reboot: on boot my Linux system uses 310M. That's without Xorg and starting only some very minimal services. After startx it uses about 405M. "RAM usage" is a tricky topic. I have 32G on my machine and there's no memory pressure at all on boot, so the kernel can just allocate/cache stuff "just in case", but it doesn't necessarily need all that memory to allocate.
  - klardotsh 2y ago
    > We're calling 400MB RAM usage ultra-lightweight now? OpenBox needs 7MB of RAM, and there are WMs that are even lighter on memory requirements. How much is your X server process using? Because a Wayland compositor has to be both the display server and the WM in one. Comparing OpenBox alone to Niri is incomplete and incorrect, you have to compare OpenBox+Xorg+(xcompmgr or whatever frame-perfect compositor) to get a 1:1-ish comparison.
sureglymop 2y ago
I just use gnome with pop-shell (though on arch). Been using it for years and never had issues with it. For me it's always felt nicer to have a tiling wm on top of something like gnome.
- mmgutz 2y ago
  Gnome is starting on a built-in mosaic layout tiler that looks on the surface similar to newm. newm is sadly no longer actively enhanced. Cosmic Desktop (creators of pop-shell) is further innovating in this area as well.
- aquariusDue 2y ago
  I too used to use pop-shell a few years ago while using PopOS but for the past 6 month or so I've felt great running Ubuntu 24.04 with the PaperWM Gnome extension. While Niri might be easier to install on Arch I would still suggest giving PaperWM a try for a week. I ended up missing it waaay too much after disabling it for a few days on a whim and now I can't imagine using a computer without a scrolling WM given the choice. Just uhh... Keep a keybindings cheatsheet nearby, like the one in the PaperWM GitHub repo.
klardotsh 2y ago
I could have word for word written almost exactly this blog post, that's how dead-on-accurate I find it, and how similar OP and I's experiences are (down to when and why we originally switched to Sway - mixed DPI long before Wayland was really "stable" for a daily driver). Niri is incredible, and has completely eliminated the mildly infuriating bin-packing and layout-optimization problems that TWMs exhibit, without sending me back to the floating WM dark ages. I wish Niri had existed like 10 years ago, but I'll accept it existing now as plenty good enough.
- LawnGnome 2y ago
  I could also say the same, including the Wayland origin story. I'm pretty new to Niri — I only started playing with it about a month ago — but it's just absolutely that little bit more than Sway I didn't know I needed.
yurlungur 2y ago
Happy to give it a try but I have 10 years using tiling wms exclusively for research and work and I never wanted to have more than 5 workspaces. I think the nice thing about wms is that mental model to keep things lean and simple, similar to how I also don't have a thousand tabs open and in fact I try to close all of the by the end of every day. I also fail to see the benefit of that many workspaces given you have other tools such as tmux etc.
alex-robbins 2y ago
Does anyone else find it suspicious that the author was using so many workspaces on sway? I have to wonder if they're not making good use of sway's tabbed and stacked containers ... > If you don't find yourself constantly swapping between fullscreen and non-fullscreen views and running out of workspaces, you don't have very many windows open. Don't even get me started on tabbed/stacked layouts with nested containers, the least ergonomic Band-Aid™ for the space issue I've ever seen. On the contrary: I think this author really ought to get started on tabbed/stacking layouts! Constantly swapping between fullscreen and non-fullscreen views, like running out of workspaces, definitely sounds like an antipattern to me. I don't believe that the number of windows is the problem here. If I'm deep into something, I might have 10 or more windows open, all on one workspace, on a 13" 1080p laptop panel. Of course, not all of the windows are visible at once. A common pattern for me is to have most of my screen taken up by a container split "horizontally" (meaning into a left side and a right side), where each side can be a tabbed container containing several windows. For example, I often have Emacs on the left, and several tabbed terminals (including man pages) on the right. Maybe some of those terminal tabs on the right are split "vertically" into a top and a bottom terminal (e.g. for a shell prompt on top and man page on bottom). Outside of this big left-right split container, which fills almost the whole screen when it's visible, I'll usually have some browser windows open. If it's just one browser window, I'll put it and the big-left-right-split (BLRS) in a stacking container. This way, you can think of the browser as being "above" the BLRS, and you can get there and back by moving the focus up and down again. It's like each stacked item (the browser and the BLRS) gets its own workspace, in that they each take up nearly the full screen when visible, but actually they're both on the same workspace, and the only cost is the loss of one title-bar's height of screen space. Then, if I want more browser windows, I can split the existing one into its own tabbed container. (I use both WM tabs and browser tabs, just like I used to use multiple browser windows on one workspace with Gnome.) Basically, as my number of windows grows, things become (slightly!) more nested, rather than being ejected into surrounding workspaces. The trick to making this ergonomic is to choose what to stack vs tab so as to allow you to flip back and forth between (at least) any two windows with just a couple keys. (I also have two keybindings to split a container and immediately make it stacking or tabbed, and also two keybindings to focus parent-wards/child-wards. Then, you can easily jump from a window in the middle of a tabbed container on the right of the screen to the window on the left half of the screen---you just focus parent-wards then left (two keys). To get back, just focus right (one key).) I should also add that I haven't really seen any problems with apps behaving badly when being resized, including Firefox. Maybe that's because my workflow mostly looks and feels like "slots" of a few different sizes (roughly full screen, half screen, quarter screen), and adding new windows to, or moving windows between, these slots is never going to change the size of the slots or the windows displayed in them. In fact, with traditional floating window managers, when has resizing a Firefox window ever caused me to lose my place in the page? Only when I make it super unusably narrow, or short, or both, and then expand it again. This is what would happen if you open a bunch of windows all in horizontal and/or vertical splits, with no stacking or tabbed containers! But why would you do that?
atlintots 2y ago
I used AwesomeWM for the longest time before switching to Wayland where I used Gnome because none of the existing WMs seemed interesting at the time. I tried riverwm for a bit but it didn't work for me either. But lately I've been super intrigued by Niri -- it feels fresh and exciting. I've been keeping an eye on it and I can't wait to try it out!
MyOutfitIsVague 2y ago
I've gone on and off tiling WMs over the years. I've just switched from Sway to this, and I'm really enjoying it so far. I have a lot of the same issues with Sway. I really like Sway, but to get the windows working great for me, I end up having to do a lot of manual window management. I really liked Paper WM with Gnome, but it had lots of little nits that made it frustrating to use (but it did a very admirable job for a Gnome shell extension), and I went back to Sway.
kazinator 2y ago
If you drag some text from here to there, it could be good to have it stay selected. You might have dragged it not quite where you wanted it; it might need another drag. Or am I misunderstanding "changed somehow to keep the selection happening after you released the mouse". (I understand that people don't like UI changes that break their muscle memory of course.)
Shugyousha 2y ago
Hm, I am using [dwm](https://dwm.suckless.org/ https://dwm.suckless.org/) with a custom keybinding to shift to the left or right workspace. That seems similar enough, other than the fact that changing the split ratio will affect all workspaces on dwm while on Niri it most likely will not ...
- ewzimm 2y ago
  I use a variety of DEs and WMs but I still can't find anything better than dwm for my desktop. If I need some extra controls, xfce4-panel runs modularly and neatly covers the main bar for whatever workspace it's on. It handles both tiling and floating perfectly. I hope more software projects pick up the focus on simplicity, especially making programs as easy to reconfigure and compile as dwm.
bardsore 2y ago
I tried Niri, but couldn't figure out how to get good enough support for X programs. Specifically I had issues with the clipboard, I couldn't copy passwords from 1Password (X) and paste them into Firefox (Wayland). Niri doesn't seem interested in having built-in first class support for X and I'm not interested in maintaining it for myself either.
- rekado 2y ago
  It is documented here: https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/wiki/Xwayland https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/wiki/Xwayland I use xwayland-satellite (for Emacs) and I can copy text in Emacs to a terminal running on Wayland.
cies 2y ago
Niri: the next redefining software project that happens to be written in Rust. (after so many: RedoxOS, Zed, ripgrep, uutils, servo, COSMIC EPOCH, ...) If there's something that the Rust community does well it is capturing enthousiasm to get stuff done.
gatane 2y ago
Windows 8 all again huh?
vondur 2y ago
Doesn't the PaperWM extension in Gnome work similarly? Granted, extensions in Gnome tend to break with every version that is released.
adityaathalye 2y ago
OMG the tenor of the writing, the terrible puns... I love it! 'tis as if I am reading a sibling from a mirror universe :) Uncanny resemblances to the first post I wrote when resurrecting my blog: https://www.evalapply.org/posts/hello-world/index.html#main https://www.evalapply.org/posts/hello-world/index.html#main
bshacklett 2y ago
We need to come up with some sort of Application User Interface contract paradigm. I, for one, am really getting tired of UIs changing constantly. Sure, the changes might bring minimal improvements, maybe even major improvements sometimes, but if it completely breaks my muscle memory, moves something so I can’t find it anymore, or otherwise forces me to relearn how to use the application, shouldn’t I, as a user, have some say in that? In the old days, we could choose when to upgrade (often at a significant financial cost). Now, things change out from under us without any notice whatsoever, or maybe with an annoying tutorial that pops up at the most inconvenient time possible.
hackburg 2y ago
[dead]

423 points by mattjhall 2y ago

z0r 2y ago

I enjoyed this post but I'm going to keep using xmonad (and X) until I can port my configuration to a wayland equivalent (if that is even possible)

qalmakka 2y ago

I just can't wrap my head around tiling WMs (and I've been doing Linux since a _long_ time ago). I just don't see how usable they can be when you have a "small" screen to be honest.

aarroyoc 2y ago
I use Niri at home and PaperWM at work but I use most apps maximized. The thing that I like is that I can move between windows in a WASD like shortcut, more convenient that doing Alt-Tab. However vertical split is also very easy to do in Niri and it's sometimes very convenient.
- broken-kebab 2y ago
  But keyboard-driven workflow is not a property of tiling WMs. You can re-configure window switching in many WMs to be whatever you like
darthrupert 2y ago
Vice versa for me: I cannot understand how people with small screens can use anything but tiling.
riquito 2y ago
More often than not you keep just one or two windows visible in the screen, and switch to another app with <super>+<number> or similar. Since you use most apps fullscreen, the small screen doesn't feel so small anymore. Feels good, honestly
thesuitonym 2y ago
That's cool, homie, maybe it's just not for you. Personally, while I understand the appeal, it's just not for me.
- broken-kebab 2y ago
  Frankly, mate, the answer is a bit too hipsterish. Of "you won't understand true underground anyway" sort. We're talking about productivity tools, if there are advantages they can be described even if subjectively.
  - thesuitonym 2y ago
    Sometimes people just like things. It's not all about productivity.
thom 2y ago
Lots of tasks involve two different apps (googling a bug while looking at the error, reading a spec while working on the code, being on a call while showing off a document etc). I'm almost always happier with two full monitors, but I use tiling when I'm stuck on a single laptop screen for example. I rarely want more than two things at once unless I'm in Emacs, and I sometimes get the sense that a lot of tiling window manager and tmux use is just people not knowing how to use their editor's built in window management and multi-process support. Obviously everyone's free to build their own environment however they like, I don't know why anyone would accept being stuck on a tiny screen for long periods though!
mmgutz 2y ago
Tilers can remove Gnome's overly whitespaced decorations, probably saving 10% in screen pixels alone. If you want to maximize all windows on run, niri can do that with a rule. It then becomes like a monocle layout where you can use swipes/keyboard/scroll wheel to navigate between maximized windows. I don't know of any DE that will run all windows maximized by default. Too bad I no longer have an 800x600 netbook. Niri would be perfect for it.

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evanjrowley 2y ago

I've never tried Niri, but I'm interested. Recently I had a good introduction to the scrollable WM experience on GNOME with the PaperWM extension: https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM

20after4 2y ago
Niri is inspired by paperWM and it’s so much smoother. If you liked PaperWM then niri might be worth a look. It does suffer a bit because it’s not built within the gnome environment. So niri is missing a few things that gnome provides “for free.” Niri leaves it up to you find replacements for some pretty basic functionality. Some things it seems to be missing: - Desktop notifications - App launcher - dock or any sort of list of running apps. - Xwayland (for seamlessly running x11 applications) All of these functions must be provided by other separate tools that are not included with niri. My biggest complaint is the lack of clipboard synchronization between x11 and Wayland. I guess that gnome handles this automatically but it’s not so in niri - Wayland apps have independent clipboard and inability copy paste between Wayland and x11 is very annoying. There are workarounds but none that I’ve tried so far are satisfactorily convenient and reliable.
- yencabulator 2y ago
  I personally consider GNOME to be much more suffering... xwayland-satellite gives you XWayland without needing compositor integration.
  - 20after4 2y ago
    Xwayland-satellite does work quitw well in most regards, however I still haven’t fully solved the clipboard sync issue. I’ve got a hack involving wl-copy piped to xclip that mostly works but sometimes it just stops working for no apparent reason. Or I wind up with multiple copies of xclip running and I have to clean it up. I wish there was a clean way to make the few x apps play nice with Wayland that doesn’t require jumping through weird hoops. Although it hasn’t driven me back to gnome (yet). Hot take: the way clipboard functionality is implemented seems pretty “odd” to me, especiallly on Unix but some of the legacy probably goes all the way back to old school Mac OS or maybe even to xerox parc. In modern times, Neither Xwindows nor Wayland have done a lot to fix past mistakes. Wayland has done a lot, however, to expose the weaknesses in a very antiquated design.

arghwhat 2y ago

Niri is cool, but was the drag issue reported? :/ sway 1.10 is from october, 1.10.1 is a bugfix from late january. Since they're talking about git bisect, I imagine they might be running master (i.e., bleeding edge) instead of stable releases...

freedomben 2y ago
They did mention that they asked for help in IRC. Not the same thing as a bug report of course, but worth mentioning.
- arghwhat 2y ago
  Yeah that's fair, but a lot of people are quite... impatient on IRC, ignoring that those able to answer might be busy or in a different timezone altogether. Debugging an issue requires at the very least the effort to reproduce it, and if the person doesn't already bring a trivial reproduction this can at times be a painful and time-consuming project to extract, and that time is not always available right at that instant. Coming in with a prepared and easy reproduction and a filed issue makes quite a difference in the response you'll get. (For the record, I don't experience anything matching what they describe on master right now, but the post was more about PaperWM vs. tiling UX so that doesn't matter that much.)

xpe 2y ago

A fun read. Everyone has their breaking point… > Naturally, instead of figuring out what library made a breaking change and spending four hours running git bisect, I decided to throw nearly a decade of muscle-memory and workflow refinements out the window.

bilekas 2y ago

> The worst "street-cred" I have is that I've been using tiling window managers for thirty-five percent of my life: five years with Sway and two with i3. As the realization of those numbers (and my age) dawns upon me The author is ~21 and seems worried they're old ? I had a good giggle about that.. And then it dawned upon me how old I actually am.

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kisonecat 2y ago
As a 40-something year old person who used ratpoison more than 21 years ago... Yeah, I feel super old now.
- vinceguidry 2y ago
  Man I miss those days. I felt so cool sitting in coffee shops with a 10 year old ThinkPad running ratpoison on Gentoo.
  - int_19h 2y ago
    Ratpoison is surprisingly good on small laptops, where everything is usually maximized anyway.
  - dimatura 2y ago
    A nice side benefit is that ratpoison is its own screen lock (for 99% of people).
- celsius1414 2y ago
  No need to feel super old! /cries in half century Reminds me of that explanation for why the years seem to move much faster when you’re older. When you’re 10, five years is half your life. When you’re 50, it’s only 10%.
- dimatura 2y ago
  I still use ratpoison, dreading the day it stops working for whatever reason (wayland being a likely one). Haven't tried it, but Cagebreak (https://github.com/project-repo/cagebreak https://github.com/project-repo/cagebreak) seems like a possible successor.

andrewla 2y ago

This looks really intriguing and I'm looking forward to using it. I'm still using i3, which is just barely good enough to work. I miss Notion, which was unfortunately too flakey and unstable to continue using, but that had one property which it looks like Niri preserves -- opening a new window will never cause a resize event. Notion is perhaps even stronger because there is no infinite canvas; opening a new window will never cause a re-layout. It will always open in a tab or a blank space. Similarly, moving windows won't cause re-layout actions; it will just move them between tabs of existing frames. My i3 configuration tried to preserve this -- it tries to make everything tabbed by default so that moving windows will just move between tabs rather than into new blanks spaces and cause a relayout action, but sometimes, for some reason, it just ... does not, and instead opens a new split. I tried to make xmonad work but I'm not good enough at Haskell to figure out if it was even possible to configure it the way I want.

the_gipsy 2y ago

I would like to know, coming from a traditional tiling window manager, how does the shortcut workflow look like? For me the number one thing is having fixed shortcuts á la Super+[0-9] to go to specific windows / workspaces / essentially a specific program. If I can have that, and additionally solving the "worskpace management" problem as TFA described, I'm sold! Does it make sense to use "workspaces" like this with Niri? For example, one workspace with the browser, one with the editor, one with several terminal columns, and so on. I would need to "switch" (immediately, without animation effects, please) e.g. from "browser" to "terminals".

tripdout 2y ago
Yes, Niri still supports numbered workspaces in the same was as WMs like Sway. It's just that now you can scroll them horizontally too.
- stevefolta 2y ago
  The one caveat -- and it's a big one -- is that Niri numbers workspaces dynamically, and won't let you have an empty workspace (except temporarily).
  - rwdf 2y ago
    You can have named workspaces now, I have ones dedicated to terminals, and browsers. They always have the same numbers.
    - stevefolta 2y ago
      Oh, perfect, thanks! I've been using Niri for less than a week, hadn't got to using named workspaces yet, and missed the bit in the docs where it says they can be empty.
- the_gipsy 2y ago
  I tried it and I'm completely sold!
2y ago

bsnnkv 2y ago

Unfortunately tiling window managers for Linux have become quite stagnant in terms of improving and iterating on workflows, which is probably why we're seeing more of the kind of sentiment expressed in this post lately (of course, the poor backwards compatibility story is not helping either) The Windows scene is definitely the place where the most interesting workflow advances in "traditional" tiling window managers are happening right now.

pona-a 2y ago
Can you point to any innovative Windows tiling WMs and explain what "workflow advances" it makes? All I found was FancyWM, and it seems basically identical to i3.
- bsnnkv 2y ago
  I'm on a phone for most of today so I won't be making the kind of lengthy reply you're asking for, but you can check out komorebi and jwno if you're genuinely interested
  - slightwinder 2y ago
    I don't see any real innovation with those WM. It looks like they are just migrating the features of advanced Linux-WMs to the windows-world, in their own way. Can you name any specific features you are considering as innovative?
    - bsnnkv 2y ago
      The main ones that I'm still waiting to see integrated into mainstream Linux twms are workspace scrolling (of course), dynamic layout rules and dynamic offset rules (important for ultrawide monitor users). I'd also like to see container limit rules to enforce stacking after meeting a threshold (functions as a hard cap on tiles-per-workspace), and native support for Vimium-style shortcuts for every UI element on the screen (from jwno), but I could probably live without these. I wouldn't call these particularly innovative features, in fact they are pretty low hanging fruit.

strobe 2y ago

I thought moving from i3/x11 to sway/wayland but from this post is looks like screen sharing still not resolved yet completely on wayland. How much time is worth to wait until UX with wayland will be good enough to not worry about that kind stuff?

Propelloni 2y ago
I can't say how much time it is worth to you, sorry. What I can say is that screen sharing works fine under Wayland and Gnome for me (AMD hardware all the way), so I'm inclined to say that Wayland is not the showstopper here.
- freedomben 2y ago
  Same. Screensharing under Wayland/Gnome with AMD hardware all the way has been working great for quite some time
- strobe 2y ago
  thanks, good to know. anyway, if one of the majors tiling wm managers struggling to share specific window it looks like it could be more edge cases like that. Probably, I can deal with those things but I fully understand struggle of this article author so just wanna upgrade to it when possibility of struggle will be minimal for me.

drcongo 2y ago

That video immediately made me wish this was available for Mac, it seemed to fit my brain's model of how things should be.

256 2y ago
there's https://github.com/mogenson/PaperWM.spoon https://github.com/mogenson/PaperWM.spoon (i haven't tried it)
loveiswork 2y ago
It's not quite the same as Niri, but in case you haven't seen there is _A_ tiling window manager for Mac: Amethyst No 'endless scrolling' aspect, but I find it works great for managing window sizing and bopping around your windows via keyboard.
incanus77 2y ago
Check out AeroSpace. It’s pretty amazing. I’m wondering if it can be made to do things like Niri. https://github.com/nikitabobko/AeroSpace https://github.com/nikitabobko/AeroSpace
- OsrsNeedsf2P 2y ago
  After hopping around MacOS window managers, I landed on Aerospace. For MacOS it's by far the best, and can do most of the things I want. But it still feels like a plastic fork and knife compared to Niri. Really wish Apple would open up more of their desktop APIs..
- timeon 2y ago
  Does anybody have experience comparing it with Yabai?
  - incanus77 2y ago
    I only tried out Yabai once I discovered AeroSpace in order to compare. I immediately appreciated AeroSpace's take on just completely sidestepping MacOS spaces.

ollybee 2y ago

I've been using sway daily since before it was really stable and recently tried Niri but maybe couldn't get over the muscle memory from sway. I use sway mostly in tabbed mode anyway which gives a similar feel to a scrolling WM but with flexibility to break out to tiles in a different workspace if needed. What has massively improved my workflow recently is vertical tabs in Firefox. I now have browser tabs I can cycle up and down through on side of my screen, and application tabs I can cycle through left and right at the top. I love it.

cafeinux 2y ago

This seems interesting. I've been thinking lately of re-installing a tilling WM on my daily driver because I have a wide screen and I spend more time rearranging and searching for windows than doing actual things on it. Also, it seems that all that screen estate could be put to better use with a tilling WM. Guess I'll give Niri a try, maybe it will fit my needs.

kemaru 2y ago

It wasn't a good fit for me. The strip of windows extending past the border of my screen, sometimes showing half a window, triggered a weird anxiety, it kept drawing my attention. I used it for about two months and then ditched it for a more traditional tiling compositor (hyprland) where windows don't overlap the screen border. Niri is, however, very pretty from a technical standpoint. Modern Rust codebase, good code structure, very easy to understand and start hacking.

pmarreck 2y ago
would a widescreen make this better or worse? (I like to work in UWQHD.)
yencabulator 2y ago
I set my column widths so there's really never a partial window at the edge. On laptop, it's either full width or 1/2 widths depending on the task, on the ultrawide it's 1/3rd width or full width for editor with internal column splits.

cnqso 2y ago

I'm a hyprland zoomer but I used Niri for a bit and it worked pretty well. It slots in perfectly for someone coming from an average single-monitor Windows workflow (for most office-style tasks). I still think that more complex tiling setups have a higher productivity ceiling though. I guess if you're like this guy and keep >10 workspaces open at once you'd have to go with Niri. I wonder if the increased battery life would still hold for someone that only keeps a few windows open at once. 2 hours is insane from just a change of wm

ffaser5gxlsll 2y ago
I'm still cycling through wayland and x11, and I also do get 1.5 hours more runtime on average on my old 2nd gen t14s with x11+xmonad+no compositor. It's one of the main reasons I'm struggling to move permanently, as I really don't see any advantage from my perspective as I don't use any desktop environment or feature that would make a compositor actually useful. The only thing I do notice occasionally are black borders due to shadow dropdowns in gtk4 programs that don't respect the system theme I've set.

deleted 2y ago

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BirAdam 2y ago

Having heard about Niri previously, I really didn't like the sound of it. Seeing the movement with hotkeys shown with each movement... well... that completely changed my perspective. I will have to give it a try.

TylerE 2y ago
Funny, I'm the opposite. The idea is intriguing, but I absolutely do not want animated. I have vision issues and animation just makes everything go (more) blurry.
- wging 2y ago
  There's apparently a config setting to turn all animations off, though I haven't tried it myself. The author linked their config file from the article, and it includes this: // Animation settings. animations { // Uncomment to turn off all animations. // off I think it's boilerplate from the default config file, which would imply that the video they showed is not the 'animations off' version, if that's not already clear from the presence of animations.
- the_gipsy 2y ago
  You can entirely turn off all animations. You can also turn off only some, like workspace switching, and reduce the durations globally.

dkersten 2y ago

This looks interesting and I’ll probably give it a try. I’ve been using Sway for the last five years and i3 for a few years previously. They work fairly well for me, I certainly didn’t have any of the problems the OP mentioned. My all time favourite window manager, though, and one I wish would be revived (perhaps as a wayland WM now. How I wish I had the free time to take this on…) is GOOMWWM which I used for a decade prior to i3 (and Musca before that).

tycho-newman 2y ago

When I was in my 20s, I was all in on Compiz. Whatever happened to it?

onli 2y ago
There were some forks and merges already back then that probably did not help. Then Canoncial hired the main dev, with the main project not surviving far beyond his later departure. Official end point for the project seems to have been https://www.phoronix.com/news/MTI2ODU https://www.phoronix.com/news/MTI2ODU, in 2012 and mentioning Wayland as reason (as if that were anywhere close back then). But actually, the launchpad repo has recent commits (or do I read https://code.launchpad.net/~compiz-team/compiz/+git/compiz/+ref/master https://code.launchpad.net/~compiz-team/compiz/+git/compiz/+... wrong), and so does https://github.com/compiz-reloaded https://github.com/compiz-reloaded. You can still just use one of those if you want - Void Linux for example has it packaged, and so does Ubuntu.
film42 2y ago
It's still around but not in active development. Tiling window managers like i3 are just a window manager, but you can add compiz as your compositor to wobble if you want. I think compton is still the most popular "just good enough" compositor used by i3 users (it's what I use). Sway is both a compositor and a window manager.
haswell 2y ago
Worth mentioning that https://wayfire.org/ https://wayfire.org/ is a spiritual successor that runs in Wayland.
imp0cat 2y ago
Well I have some great news for you if you're running plain Gnome today. You need this! https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/4679/burn-my-windows/ https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/4679/burn-my-windows/

discardedrefuse 2y ago

KDE users might be interested in Karousel. A Kwin script that also does scrollable tiling windows in KDE. https://github.com/peterfajdiga/karousel https://github.com/peterfajdiga/karousel

kelvie 2y ago
I've use it daily since the whole hyprland toxicity thing. It works amazing for my workflow, but there are a ton of wrinkles if you stray off the happy path, but it works great (for me). I also only use a single monitor, trying to plug a second monitor in makes it work less than ideally, and I really wish there was drag + drop support like most other tilers, but for me it's not worth giving up the rest of KDE.

DarkCrusader2 2y ago

Does anyone know the best way to get some tiling behavior in tradition DEs like Cinnamon. Some basic things like notifications, keyboard controls for volume/brightness, sound etc don't work the best in i3wm by default and requires some fiddling on each machine to get it to work properly. I love the out of the box behavior of my Mint installation and don't want to switch completely to something like i3wm. I could get even a watered down version tiling and stacking like i3 with keyboard shortcuts, I would be very happy. There is gTile but it doesn't quite work the same way.

dingnuts 2y ago
Not sure about Cinnamon, which is a pet project by Linux Mint, but Gnome and Kwin offer some options these days: https://github.com/ellysaurus/KWin-TilingGuide/ https://github.com/ellysaurus/KWin-TilingGuide/ https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM https://github.com/peterfajdiga/karousel https://github.com/peterfajdiga/karousel there might be more

Starlevel004 2y ago

I tried using Niri but the per-monitor workspace behaviour is completely unacceptable to me. I don't use a laptop.

anarcat 2y ago
can you expand on that? how does it compare to sway, for example? what's unacceptable and acceptable for you?
- Starlevel004 2y ago
  Sway (and most other tiling) WMs have the same behaviour; i.e., each monitor has its own unique set of workspaces instead of one workspace being shared across monitors. Workspaces not being persistent also messed with me, I have eight workspaces all divvied up for exact purposes and sometimes the ones inbetween are empty. I use labwc currently which has the ideal workspace behaviour (one workspace shared).
  - anarcat 2y ago
    right, those are the two ways. and how does niri do it? a workspace is shared among all monitor, or it's one workspace per monitor?
MyOutfitIsVague 2y ago
This is interesting and subjective. A shared workspace is completely unacceptable to me. I need my monitors to have different, unlinked workspaces that can be independently switched. It's one of the things I hated about using Gnome.

ahub 2y ago

Coming from the same background as the author and about checks notes 15 years older (ouch), I loved Niri very much. However I never managed to make x11 windows behave correctly. At the moment the solutions are a bit cumbersome [0] and I didn't manage to have a smooth experience so far... [0] https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/wiki/Xwayland https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/wiki/Xwayland

yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
I don't have a lot of practice with it, but what problems did you have with xwayland-satellite? It really seems like you just run it and everything magically works

jackbravo 2y ago

Is there something equivalent or similar for MacOS? This seems great! I use (and pay) for the magnet app, I don't like the native fullscreen functionality or split screen options.

jackbravo 2y ago
Ha! The niri README has an answer for this, https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri, it is https://github.com/mogenson/PaperWM.spoon https://github.com/mogenson/PaperWM.spoon, "Tiled scrollable window manager for MacOS".
- phildenhoff 2y ago
  Thanks! As soon as I saw Niri I wondered if there was a macOS alternative. Aerospace has a similar resizing glitch as PaperWM.spoon: resizing one direction ends up looking wonky if you do it fast enough. It’s noticeable at the end of the smooth scrolling demo. That must be a macOS thing… I may check out PaperWM.spoon at some point but realistically I’ll set up a VM and try out Niri

mrbluecoat 2y ago

I think the post should be retitled "The Future Is Niri [for people who never touch their mouse and instead like memorizing keyboard shortcuts]" (watch the bottom-right readout on the video)

yencabulator 2y ago
I use Niri largely by touchpad gestures.

dhrm1k 2y ago

funny I got to know about ersei from Purdue linux group's members list and here he is on the frontpage of hn.

sunshine-o 2y ago

Scrollable WMs are really terrific because you get about 80% of the productivity benefits of a tiling WM with 20% of the effort. I am puzzeled by the fact it took us 30-40 years to figure it out !

alabastervlog 2y ago
I watched the video on the site and this looks like absolute hell, as someone who uses drag-n-drop between programs fairly often. I'm also someone whose open browser tabs tend to grow indefinitely until I just have to bookmark and close all hundred of them or whatever, so... yeah, this entire paradigm looks extremely not for me.
- sunshine-o 2y ago
  > this looks like absolute hell, as someone who uses drag-n-drop between programs fairly often The way people use it is you constantly reorder windows according to your workflow so DnD is not a problem. > I'm also someone whose open browser tabs tend to grow indefinitely until I just have to bookmark and close all hundred of them or whatever I agree the tab model is an horror. The problem is for most people the tabs are their browsing history, with a visual clutter. My guess is there is an huge opportunity for rethinking the whole web browser history/tab model.
  - sureglymop 2y ago
    Another thing I hate especially in firefox is that one can't pin tabs on the right, next to the newest tabs and the new tabs button. So often one has to keep one or two tabs open but otherwise open many new ones to research something.
- muixoozie 2y ago
  > I'm also someone whose open browser tabs tend to grow indefinitely until I just have to bookmark and close all hundred of them or whatever, so... You might like the tabstash browser extension
2y ago

tasuki 2y ago

I use Gnome and basically full-screen all my windows. Sometimes I use win+left/right to create a half-width window. Am I a caveman?

bootsmann 2y ago
I use this too, the keybinds carry to windows which is very convenient. I get stunlocked by muscle memory when working in macos tho.
- tiagod 2y ago
  Try out Rectangle. You can set keybinds to match what you're used to.
alabastervlog 2y ago
I'll occasionally do quarters. Especially half on one side, two quarter-windows on the other, for a 3-window arrangement. On Mac. My key bindings are a little different because I use the defaults in Spectacle to do it. More than a decade like that. Program's discontinued but still works and has never given me so much as one problem this entire time, so I'm going to keep using it until it stops working.
- kingnothing 2y ago
  Tiling is now built in to MacOS if you want to give that a try: https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/mac-window-tiling-icons-keyboard-shortcuts-mchl9674d0b0/mac https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/mac-window-tiling-i...
  - alabastervlog 2y ago
    Yeah, I haven't seen a way to change the keybindings so they match my muscle memory. My current set-up is "brew install spectacle", cmd+space+"spect"+return, tick the checkbox to run at startup, then never think about it again—even if there were a way, I'd also have to go to the trouble of scripting the keybinding changes to make it this easy.

maelito 2y ago

My biggest problem with wayland was support for french characters. So annoying, so basic. L'accent circonflexe ne marchait pas. Last time I tried, a few weeks ago, it wasn't better.

gautamcgoel 2y ago
Just out of curiosity, what issues do you encounter? Doesn't Wayland support Unicode?
the_gipsy 2y ago
You can use basically the same old xkb configs as with xorg. I have some hacked together keyboard layout in an xkb file, that I share across tty / xorg / wayland.

flkiwi 2y ago

I tried to use niri, but I couldn't get it working on NixOS. That is almost certainly user error on my part, but, as a devoted paperwm user in my gnome days, I'm very much on board with what niri is offering. And since this is a discussion of linux window managers: Currently I'm using hyprland, which is great, but the one I really want to keep maturing is river. It's a very sensible WM that is nonetheless not completely hostile to fun like at least one wayland WM I'm not going to name.

yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
> I tried to use niri, but I couldn't get it working on NixOS. Couldn't get what to work? Like, you switch to a VT, run nix-shell -p niri niri and it crashes, or...?
- flkiwi 2y ago
  There was, at the time, some sort of issue with the flake. So, really, I couldn't get it running with flakes. I should really try it again.
bulatb 2y ago
> That is almost certainly user error on my part If an interested and reasonably savvy person can't get a program to work as it claims, the problem is the program, not the user.
- hackeraccount 2y ago
  That's what someone who's been working in IT for either a day or 20 years says.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
yencabulator 2y ago
Works just fine here. There was a time when there was something wrong with the graphics stack and it crashed on start, but it runs just fine now. NixOS 24.11, launching it from getty with environment.loginShellInit = '' if [ "$(tty)" == /dev/tty1 -a "$USER" != "root" ]; then exec systemd-cat -t niri niri --session fi '';

sroussey 2y ago

This looks like some headset UI designs to me. Viture comes to mind.

haswell 2y ago

I love the idea of tiling window managers and I've done reasonably long stints with i3 and hyprland, but for some reason, I've always struggled to fully stick with them and have fallen back to Xfce (old habits die hard). I think what always ends the experiment is that once I reach a certain number of windows, it can be more challenging to manage them if you haven't gone deep enough down the rabbit hole to properly configure workspaces, layouts, etc. I just fired up Niri, and in 10 minutes I already feel more comfortable than I have with other tiling window managers. It feels immediately intuitive, and the mouse integration is excellent. Maybe it's too early to declare victory, but this really truly looks like exactly what I've been wanting/needing for years. I'll judge how good it is by how long it takes me to think about going back to Xfce ;)

cosmic_cheese 2y ago
Tiling never worked for me either. Might be because the place I use Linux most is on laptops, where screens are too small to do much tiling aside from maybe splitting the screen in half (and even that doesn’t play nice with things like IDEs). Plain, boring, non-trendy floating WMs/DEs with some lightweight optional tiling has proven most optimal for me.
- lll-o-lll 2y ago
  It’s on laptops where I appreciate tiling the most. Simple hotkey switching between apps (workspaces) is much better than mouse over some taskbar or alt tab tab tab tab.
  - 75902846575 2y ago
    There are floating WMs with multiple workspaces you can switch between with hotkeys. It's not a feature exclusive to tiling WMs.
    - yencabulator 2y ago
      With the tiling WM, you spend essentially no time arranging windows, they're all just laptop-screen-filling. On the ultrawide they're all 1/3rd of screen which is the perfect for that monitor size. I haven't clicked a single maximize button in a decade or so.

jdiez17 2y ago

I’m also a long time i3/sway user and find Niri quite comfy. I can carry over most of my muscle memory from sway for navigating the focus, moving windows etc. I’ve also found it to be very stable and works out of the box with xwayland-satellite. My biggest issue is that I keep “losing” windows. I open them in a deeply nested stack, do something else and forgot I already had opened the window. It also happens with sway to some extent but it’s a lot easier to scroll through all workspaces. It would be nice to have something like a “window map” bound to Alt-Tab.

presto8 2y ago
Would alttab meet your needs? I've been using it with xmonad and it works well. https://github.com/sagb/alttab https://github.com/sagb/alttab
- jdiez17 2y ago
  That seems to be X11 only, so not really. It should also be workspace-aware.
cycomanic 2y ago
Hyprscroller (a hyprland plugin with similar functionality as niri) has an "expose" type function. I tend to forget it's there though.
boomskats 2y ago
You talking about something like the issue I linked to earlier? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43347909 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43347909 FWIW I've got a niri IPC / bash / jq abomination that emulates run-or-raise functionality and works probably better than the original RoR. It cycles through windows matching a particular appId and starts one if one doesn't already exist. That, alongside rofi(wayland) as a fuzzy search nav for all open windows, made a huge difference to me.
- jdiez17 2y ago
  Yep, that's exactly what I'm looking for. Your bash script is far less of an abomination than what you made it sound like :)

specproc 2y ago

I can recommend trying out any non-standard WM to anyone looking to learn more about what's going on with a Linux desktop. I learned more about Linux playing around with TWMs than any other class of software. I don't know if it's really made me any more productive, but it's a fantastic learning experience, the ergonomics are great, and there's incredible satisfaction in building your own desktop environment from the ground up.

freedomben 2y ago
What are some of the most interesting WMs in your opinion?
- thugcee 2y ago
  For X11: Binary Space Partitioning WM https://github.com/baskerville/bspwm https://github.com/baskerville/bspwm
- PuercoPop 2y ago
  wmii[0], it implements the acme window layout. But the interesting part is that it exposes its state as a file-system. The main loop is a shell script[1]. So BYO posible, fe here is a Ruby one [2] [0]: https://github.com/0intro/wmii https://github.com/0intro/wmii [1]: https://github.com/0intro/wmii/blob/main/cmd/wmii.rc.rc https://github.com/0intro/wmii/blob/main/cmd/wmii.rc.rc [2]: https://github.com/sunaku/wmiirc https://github.com/sunaku/wmiirc
- specproc 2y ago
  I don't know about interesting, I think Niri from the parent looks like something I'd like to try. I've used i3 and moved to hyprland (because it's pretty). From the perspective I was coming from, I don't think it matters that much, you'll run into the same issues with any of them. It's about understanding all the things Gnome/KDE/Xfce etc do for you, and how you can set that up differently yourself using components of your choice.

PixelForg 2y ago

I was interested in Niri until I saw that it had the same issue that other wayland compositors have (except Gnome and KDE) i.e xwayland scaling > Display scaling (integer or fractional) will make X11 apps look blurry; this needs to be supported in xwayland-satellite.

ge96 2y ago

where's i3 gaps and the ricing

crabbone 2y ago

I use stumpwm. The reason is to have fewer features. In the few years I've used it, I never wanted to select text with mouse (although sometimes I had no choice, eg. in PDF), but even then, I never wanted to drag it with the mouse (and I never needed to do that). I don't even know if that would work, and even if it doesn't--wouldn't care... If I didn't need a Web browser and a PDF reader I wouldn't be running X at all... I wish there was a usable alternative for the browser and PDF reader that didn't require X...

WeZzyNL 2y ago

It's X11 but whenever (tiling) window managers are mentioned, I feel a strong urge to mention Herbstluftwm [0]. It's more manual than the automatic splitting most tiling WMs do but I really enjoy how easy it is to split/tab using the keyboard in Herbstluftwm. [0] https://herbstluftwm.org/ https://herbstluftwm.org/

cmrdporcupine 2y ago

How did we get to a place where a major popular piece of software like this will provide binary packaging for basically every distribution other than Debian (and, by extension, Ubuntu)? This feels out of step with the last 30 years of Linux software development... These are very popular distributions...

eximius 2y ago

Glad to see Smithay has approached a point that lots of things are being built on it. Last I really deeply looked at all this was when Way Cooler abandoned wlroots-rs. And to my pleasant surprise, it seems like there may finally be an AwesomeWM alternative for Wayland now! (Pinnacle)

Ferret7446 2y ago

I think i3/sway has deceived a lot of people into thinking that tiling means manual tiling. Having to manually split and arrange your windows is not how tiling is supposed to work.

pkulak 2y ago
I switched from Sway to River and have been very happy. However, I noticed Niri when it came out, and was extremely intrigued. Haven't check back in since, but it looks like the project is still humming along, which is awesome. I may have to check it out.
koiueo 2y ago
Deceived? I knew I prefer manual tiling since the very moment I tried wmii. It was the first time tiling made sense to me, and it was a major productivity booster on my 12" laptop. On such small screen I can't care less about all those spiral, bsp and other tiling schemes automatic twms offer.

boomskats 2y ago

The _only_ thing I feel Niri still needs is this: https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/discussions/352#discussioncomment-10094739 https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/discussions/352#discussioncom... Otherwise it is the perfect endgame UX for me. Regardless of screen size or form factor. I never thought I'd find something that I liked better than i3/sway, but those subtle niri animations, at double speed? On a high refresh rate monitor, w/ amdgpu? Ahh. Chef's kiss <3

mmgutz 2y ago

Niri is RAM efficient. I run Niri in an 8GB VM on Intel Macbook, and on a $99 8GB mini PC. Total RAM usage on boot is less than 400MB with waybar, polkit, ssh-agent, mako ... That's in the ultra lightweight WM category. Compare that to Gnome+paperwm (1.6GB) There are features Niri sorely needs: 1) 2D overview (zoom in/out), 2) enhanced meta for windows (to create window indicator [1] and window picker)

75902846575 2y ago
We're calling 400MB RAM usage ultra-lightweight now? OpenBox needs 7MB of RAM, and there are WMs that are even lighter on memory requirements. > Compare that to Gnome+paperwm (1.6GB) Anything seems lightweight if you compare it to a DE well known for its bloat.
- mmgutz 2y ago
  Niri doesn't use 400MB by itself, that's the entire memory footprint of everything running. In comparison, OpenBox with all the utilities needed for wallet, ssh agent etc is in the 450MB range on my box. That's probably due X11 vs Wayland. A minimal Niri functional environment is similar to IceWM in RAM usage. I used to run antiX in VMs.
- arp242 2y ago
  > We're calling 400MB RAM usage ultra-lightweight now? OpenBox needs 7MB of RAM, and there are WMs that are even lighter on memory requirements. My WM uses 1,158K of RAM, or basically just a bit above 1M. This is a very minimal custom thing I wrote years ago that works for me. But the previous person said "total RAM usage on boot". I was curious enough to reboot: on boot my Linux system uses 310M. That's without Xorg and starting only some very minimal services. After startx it uses about 405M. "RAM usage" is a tricky topic. I have 32G on my machine and there's no memory pressure at all on boot, so the kernel can just allocate/cache stuff "just in case", but it doesn't necessarily need all that memory to allocate.
- klardotsh 2y ago
  > We're calling 400MB RAM usage ultra-lightweight now? OpenBox needs 7MB of RAM, and there are WMs that are even lighter on memory requirements. How much is your X server process using? Because a Wayland compositor has to be both the display server and the WM in one. Comparing OpenBox alone to Niri is incomplete and incorrect, you have to compare OpenBox+Xorg+(xcompmgr or whatever frame-perfect compositor) to get a 1:1-ish comparison.

sureglymop 2y ago

I just use gnome with pop-shell (though on arch). Been using it for years and never had issues with it. For me it's always felt nicer to have a tiling wm on top of something like gnome.

mmgutz 2y ago
Gnome is starting on a built-in mosaic layout tiler that looks on the surface similar to newm. newm is sadly no longer actively enhanced. Cosmic Desktop (creators of pop-shell) is further innovating in this area as well.
aquariusDue 2y ago
I too used to use pop-shell a few years ago while using PopOS but for the past 6 month or so I've felt great running Ubuntu 24.04 with the PaperWM Gnome extension. While Niri might be easier to install on Arch I would still suggest giving PaperWM a try for a week. I ended up missing it waaay too much after disabling it for a few days on a whim and now I can't imagine using a computer without a scrolling WM given the choice. Just uhh... Keep a keybindings cheatsheet nearby, like the one in the PaperWM GitHub repo.

klardotsh 2y ago

I could have word for word written almost exactly this blog post, that's how dead-on-accurate I find it, and how similar OP and I's experiences are (down to when and why we originally switched to Sway - mixed DPI long before Wayland was really "stable" for a daily driver). Niri is incredible, and has completely eliminated the mildly infuriating bin-packing and layout-optimization problems that TWMs exhibit, without sending me back to the floating WM dark ages. I wish Niri had existed like 10 years ago, but I'll accept it existing now as plenty good enough.

LawnGnome 2y ago
I could also say the same, including the Wayland origin story. I'm pretty new to Niri — I only started playing with it about a month ago — but it's just absolutely that little bit more than Sway I didn't know I needed.

yurlungur 2y ago

Happy to give it a try but I have 10 years using tiling wms exclusively for research and work and I never wanted to have more than 5 workspaces. I think the nice thing about wms is that mental model to keep things lean and simple, similar to how I also don't have a thousand tabs open and in fact I try to close all of the by the end of every day. I also fail to see the benefit of that many workspaces given you have other tools such as tmux etc.

alex-robbins 2y ago

Does anyone else find it suspicious that the author was using so many workspaces on sway? I have to wonder if they're not making good use of sway's tabbed and stacked containers ... > If you don't find yourself constantly swapping between fullscreen and non-fullscreen views and running out of workspaces, you don't have very many windows open. Don't even get me started on tabbed/stacked layouts with nested containers, the least ergonomic Band-Aid™ for the space issue I've ever seen. On the contrary: I think this author really ought to get started on tabbed/stacking layouts! Constantly swapping between fullscreen and non-fullscreen views, like running out of workspaces, definitely sounds like an antipattern to me. I don't believe that the number of windows is the problem here. If I'm deep into something, I might have 10 or more windows open, all on one workspace, on a 13" 1080p laptop panel. Of course, not all of the windows are visible at once. A common pattern for me is to have most of my screen taken up by a container split "horizontally" (meaning into a left side and a right side), where each side can be a tabbed container containing several windows. For example, I often have Emacs on the left, and several tabbed terminals (including man pages) on the right. Maybe some of those terminal tabs on the right are split "vertically" into a top and a bottom terminal (e.g. for a shell prompt on top and man page on bottom). Outside of this big left-right split container, which fills almost the whole screen when it's visible, I'll usually have some browser windows open. If it's just one browser window, I'll put it and the big-left-right-split (BLRS) in a stacking container. This way, you can think of the browser as being "above" the BLRS, and you can get there and back by moving the focus up and down again. It's like each stacked item (the browser and the BLRS) gets its own workspace, in that they each take up nearly the full screen when visible, but actually they're both on the same workspace, and the only cost is the loss of one title-bar's height of screen space. Then, if I want more browser windows, I can split the existing one into its own tabbed container. (I use both WM tabs and browser tabs, just like I used to use multiple browser windows on one workspace with Gnome.) Basically, as my number of windows grows, things become (slightly!) more nested, rather than being ejected into surrounding workspaces. The trick to making this ergonomic is to choose what to stack vs tab so as to allow you to flip back and forth between (at least) any two windows with just a couple keys. (I also have two keybindings to split a container and immediately make it stacking or tabbed, and also two keybindings to focus parent-wards/child-wards. Then, you can easily jump from a window in the middle of a tabbed container on the right of the screen to the window on the left half of the screen---you just focus parent-wards then left (two keys). To get back, just focus right (one key).) I should also add that I haven't really seen any problems with apps behaving badly when being resized, including Firefox. Maybe that's because my workflow mostly looks and feels like "slots" of a few different sizes (roughly full screen, half screen, quarter screen), and adding new windows to, or moving windows between, these slots is never going to change the size of the slots or the windows displayed in them. In fact, with traditional floating window managers, when has resizing a Firefox window ever caused me to lose my place in the page? Only when I make it super unusably narrow, or short, or both, and then expand it again. This is what would happen if you open a bunch of windows all in horizontal and/or vertical splits, with no stacking or tabbed containers! But why would you do that?

atlintots 2y ago

I used AwesomeWM for the longest time before switching to Wayland where I used Gnome because none of the existing WMs seemed interesting at the time. I tried riverwm for a bit but it didn't work for me either. But lately I've been super intrigued by Niri -- it feels fresh and exciting. I've been keeping an eye on it and I can't wait to try it out!

MyOutfitIsVague 2y ago

I've gone on and off tiling WMs over the years. I've just switched from Sway to this, and I'm really enjoying it so far. I have a lot of the same issues with Sway. I really like Sway, but to get the windows working great for me, I end up having to do a lot of manual window management. I really liked Paper WM with Gnome, but it had lots of little nits that made it frustrating to use (but it did a very admirable job for a Gnome shell extension), and I went back to Sway.

kazinator 2y ago

If you drag some text from here to there, it could be good to have it stay selected. You might have dragged it not quite where you wanted it; it might need another drag. Or am I misunderstanding "changed somehow to keep the selection happening after you released the mouse". (I understand that people don't like UI changes that break their muscle memory of course.)

Shugyousha 2y ago

Hm, I am using [dwm](https://dwm.suckless.org/ https://dwm.suckless.org/) with a custom keybinding to shift to the left or right workspace. That seems similar enough, other than the fact that changing the split ratio will affect all workspaces on dwm while on Niri it most likely will not ...

ewzimm 2y ago
I use a variety of DEs and WMs but I still can't find anything better than dwm for my desktop. If I need some extra controls, xfce4-panel runs modularly and neatly covers the main bar for whatever workspace it's on. It handles both tiling and floating perfectly. I hope more software projects pick up the focus on simplicity, especially making programs as easy to reconfigure and compile as dwm.

bardsore 2y ago

I tried Niri, but couldn't figure out how to get good enough support for X programs. Specifically I had issues with the clipboard, I couldn't copy passwords from 1Password (X) and paste them into Firefox (Wayland). Niri doesn't seem interested in having built-in first class support for X and I'm not interested in maintaining it for myself either.

rekado 2y ago
It is documented here: https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/wiki/Xwayland https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/wiki/Xwayland I use xwayland-satellite (for Emacs) and I can copy text in Emacs to a terminal running on Wayland.

cies 2y ago

Niri: the next redefining software project that happens to be written in Rust. (after so many: RedoxOS, Zed, ripgrep, uutils, servo, COSMIC EPOCH, ...) If there's something that the Rust community does well it is capturing enthousiasm to get stuff done.

gatane 2y ago

Windows 8 all again huh?

vondur 2y ago

Doesn't the PaperWM extension in Gnome work similarly? Granted, extensions in Gnome tend to break with every version that is released.

adityaathalye 2y ago

OMG the tenor of the writing, the terrible puns... I love it! 'tis as if I am reading a sibling from a mirror universe :) Uncanny resemblances to the first post I wrote when resurrecting my blog: https://www.evalapply.org/posts/hello-world/index.html#main https://www.evalapply.org/posts/hello-world/index.html#main

bshacklett 2y ago

We need to come up with some sort of Application User Interface contract paradigm. I, for one, am really getting tired of UIs changing constantly. Sure, the changes might bring minimal improvements, maybe even major improvements sometimes, but if it completely breaks my muscle memory, moves something so I can’t find it anymore, or otherwise forces me to relearn how to use the application, shouldn’t I, as a user, have some say in that? In the old days, we could choose when to upgrade (often at a significant financial cost). Now, things change out from under us without any notice whatsoever, or maybe with an annoying tutorial that pops up at the most inconvenient time possible.

hackburg 2y ago

[dead]