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The Future Is Niri

ersei.net

81–90 of 223 posts

Re: The Future Is Niri

#81
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.

Re: The Future Is Niri

#83
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 ;)

Re: The Future Is Niri

#84
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.

Re: The Future Is Niri

#85
post #74

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?

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.

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-i...

Re: The Future Is Niri

#86
post #83

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 co…

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.

Re: The Future Is Niri

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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-i...

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.

Re: The Future Is Niri

#88
post #16

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

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

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..

Re: The Future Is Niri

#89
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.

Re: The Future Is Niri

#90
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.

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