Live data from Hacker News

The Future Is Niri

ersei.net

161–170 of 223 posts

Re: The Future Is Niri

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are floating WMs with multiple workspaces you can switch between with hotkeys. It's not a feature exclusive to tiling WMs.

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.

Re: The Future Is Niri

#162
post #23

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…

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.

Re: The Future Is Niri

#163

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

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…

I personally consider GNOME to be much more suffering...

xwayland-satellite gives you XWayland without needing compositor integration.

Re: The Future Is Niri

#165

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

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.

Re: The Future Is Niri

#166
post #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 complet…

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
    '';

Re: The Future Is Niri

#167
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 was likewise. And I found that my workflow was very compatible with tiling window managers. I used splits for temporary apps (like a 30 sec diversion into a terminal) but otherwise dedicated an entire workspace/screen to each app. It's a marginal improvement over Gnome, things are more likely to be in the right place out-of-the-gate (and, honestly, how often do you actually need to z-stack windows?).

I initially thought that an even better WM would be in the realm of an real-time strategy game camera: an infinite 2D canvas with "keybindable" locations+zooms. Niri has convinced me that my idea was too complicated, and it hits the perfect spot between functionality and usability.

It's like technology gifted to us by aliens from the future.

Re: The Future Is Niri

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I personally consider GNOME to be much more suffering... xwayland-satellite gives you XWayland without needing compositor integration.

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.

Re: The Future Is Niri

#169

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…

What are some of the most interesting WMs in your opinion?

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.

Re: The Future Is Niri

#170
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is me exactly haha. What I really want is just gnome with a little more tiling capability for the rare occasion, like thirds and quarters. But the majority of my tiling needs are in the terminal and tmux is the hero

I'd really like someone to implement https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2023/07/26/rethinking-windo...

It looks great when the windows have no content and fit in any size!
Post reply on HN