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Niri 26.04: Scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor

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Re: Niri 26.04: Scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor

#33

Post by vatsachak »

WD-42 wrote: post #32
vatsachak wrote: post #31

Turns out a Russian prodigy can build something better than 100 million dollars worth of Claude tokens Totally not mass psychosis guys pump the SPY

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

I agree that YalTer is a prodigy and that we are better off giving him a million dollars than spending 100 million on Claude Tokens

Re: Niri 26.04: Scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor

#34

Post by helterskelter »

mplanchard wrote: post #26
ChrisLTD wrote: post #24

I’ve been using the PaperWM extension for Gnome (that I believe Niri took inspiration from?), and it’s definitely an interesting way to work. I’m not sure that I love it, I feel like it’s a bit cumbersome when I have more than 3 windows in a single workspace. But I’m giving it a real shot, and the nice thing about it being a Gnome extension is that the rest of the Gnome DE is right there without a ton of config.

I had wanted to switch to niri for some time, but it was always a massive, several day process to figure out all the accessory config (top bar, idle timeouts, notifications, etc.). Mentioned in another comment that I have since discovered that there are wayland "desktop shells" that provide the majority of the kit and kaboodle you'd expect from gnome or whatever, with minimal or no fussing, including settings dialogs…

NGL, Claude has made this sort of thing so much easier. It used to take a very long time to get a WM just the way you wanted it, especially if you were using new tools you were unfamiliar with and weren't sure if they'd do what you wanted them to. Now it takes a few hours. There's value to learning to do it by hand...but honestly, when I've got everything set up I don't mess around with it much, and by the time I want to change something I have to relearn it all anyway. My setups aren't super complicated, just refined, so it's all pretty readily comprehensible.

Re: Niri 26.04: Scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor

#35

Post by nolist_policy »

mplanchard wrote: post #22
nolist_policy wrote: post #19

Slightly off topic: Does anyone know a window manager where you can map virtual desktops to real monitors? E.g. When I'm on the move I cycle through my virtual desktops on my laptop screen, but when connecting a monitor I want to cycle between my virtual desktops independently on either screen. While both screens share the same set of virtual desktops.

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

Seems almost like what I want. It's a bit smarter too, I guess I'll give it a try:

> Each monitor contains an independent set of workspaces arranged vertically. [...] You can move a workspace to a different monitor [...]

> When you disconnect a monitor, its workspaces will automatically move to a different monitor. But, they will also "remember" their original monitor, so when you reconnect it, the workspaces will automatically move back to it.

https://niri-wm.github.io/niri/Workspaces.html#overview

Re: Niri 26.04: Scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor

#36

Post by dang »

Related:

The dank case for scrolling window managers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46820468 - Jan 2026 (61 comments)

Niri 25.11 released with alt-tab and other improvements - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46097051 - Nov 2025 (1 comment)

Niri – A scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45461500 - Oct 2025 (229 comments)

The Future Is Niri - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43342178 - March 2025 (216 comments)

Niri: A scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37367687 - Sept 2023 (37 comments)

Re: Niri 26.04: Scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor

#37

Post by least »

varun_ch wrote: post #25

I used Niri on a Framework laptop a few months ago, and it was Okay. I don’t think it clicked with me/I’m not sure if I was using it right, but it was giving me a headache to mentally deal with spatially mapping all of my windows (I came from MacOS where I just knew which windows I had open and cmd+tab into the right one when needed).. I think I would’ve adjusted best if I could somehow just watch someone do their da…

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

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

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

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

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

Re: Niri 26.04: Scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor

#38

Post by jrm4 »

Slightly offtopic and it's odd because I'm asking for something that feels like should exist though, like, I get that I have no right to it.

This, for X, but not under Gnome or KDE? Even better, perhaps as just a script or something under Openbox?

(might be time to get into the vibecoding...)

Re: Niri 26.04: Scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor

#39

Post by brightball »

nickjj wrote: post #2

Niri is so good. I've switched to using it about 5 months ago and it was legit the best computing decision I can remember making in recent history to move away from Windows. I have a huge amount of gratitude towards the author of niri. My dotfiles have always included an install script for setting everything up around command line tools, theme switching and more but it fully supports niri now too on Arch based distro…

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