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Niri – A scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor

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Re: Niri – A scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor

#191

Post by WhyNotHugo »

ducktective wrote: post #46
benoliver999 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes same here but with i3, I ran it for over 10 years but niri was just an instant 'aha' moment for me. I will say, recent builds have a 'mini map' sort of zoom-out feature that I quite like - my one critique of niri was that I would sometimes get 'lost'.

One of the advantages of tilling wm are that every window that is run, is visible too. Nothing invisible exists. But in this "endless horizontal tilling" scheme, the above principle would no longer hold, right?

Tiling window managers have tabs, so not all windows are visible.

You can see window titles on the tabs on the tab bar, but you can’t even see the title of windows which are in a split container of a background tab.

Re: Niri – A scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor

#193

Post by cycomanic »

ryukoposting wrote: post #190
cycomanic wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was using i3/sway for years previously as well (and some awesome, qtile before that). The big difference is window size. Generally I believe most people like to order their workspacesroughly by topic, e.g. all work related Windows on one, browser or on another, some also do all terminals on one... Now with sway/i3 I often found myself in the situation where I was e.g. on the "browser" desktop and you read something…

Thank you for the explanation! Between your explanation and a Youtube video I found of someone using it, I think have a grip on the "why" now. Interestingly, it seems like I might use i3 a little differently than you did. A single working context for me can span many desktops, and I just work in a way that keeps my number of concurrent working contexts low. I only ever have 1-2 programs on any given desktop, and even…

Yes it seems like you're using i3 quite differently. I agree that if you good discipline about opening and closing windows in the right workspace/tile i3 can give you a more structured layout. I just found for myself even if I tried I could not keep the discipline up (I doesn't help that I often work on several things at the same time).

I think that's the beauty of tiling WMs (and I consider scrolling WMs a subset), you can really adjust them to suit your work flow even if work flows might be very different. In contrast stacking WMs seem to be more a lowest common denominator type thing. They work with every workflow, but suboptimal.

Re: Niri – A scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor

#195

Post by Shebanator »

beala wrote: post #184
argiopetech wrote: post #14

Niri convinced me to give up xmonad. I ran xmonad exclusively for 14 years. Being able to have an unlimited number of windows on a desktop (without continually switching the tiling structure) makes them collections of topics rather than having multiple desktops bounded by what fits comfortably. What used to be a switch from the "editor and terminals" desktop to the "browser" desktop is now horizontal movement on the…

For me, the appeal of i3/sway's model is that by having a desktop per topic (eg, one for browser, one for code, one for slack, etc) I can instantly jump to the topic I need with a single key press. The desktops I assign never change, so it's always Super+1 for my browser and Super+4 for Slack. It's all muscle memory, and I could do it in my sleep. When I jump to that desktop, everything is open and tiled. This was a…

Niri has named workspaces, each of which has a scrolling model. So you can achieve something very very close to what you want.

Re: Niri – A scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor

#196

Post by NatKarmios »

chrchr wrote: post #159
jzb wrote: post #15

I've been running niri for months now on my primary desktop, I wrote about it for LWN here: https://lwn.net/Articles/1025866/ "Normal" tiling WMs / compositors just don't work for me, but the tiling model does. Before niri, I used PaperWM and GNOME -- but a GNOME extension can only do so much. I wish the folks doing COSMIC would add scrollable tiling, but unless/until they do I'll probably stick with niri.

I also switched from PaperWM to niri, and I was reluctant to do it, because I really liked not having to configure several different little apps to get a working desktop environment. GNOME comes out of the box with an app launcher, a basic configuration editor, a screen locker, widgets for controlling audio and network, etc. But ultimately, PaperWM was too quirky. For example, sometimes PaperWM and an app would disag…

I'm in a similar situation; I think QuickShell [1] could be a compelling option, particularly premade configs for it like DankMaterialShell [2] (which is intended for Niri).

[1] https://quickshell.org/

[2] https://github.com/AvengeMedia/DankMaterialShell

Re: Niri – A scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor

#197

Post by Shebanator »

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #191
ducktective wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the advantages of tilling wm are that every window that is run, is visible too. Nothing invisible exists. But in this "endless horizontal tilling" scheme, the above principle would no longer hold, right?

Tiling window managers have tabs, so not all windows are visible. You can see window titles on the tabs on the tab bar, but you can’t even see the title of windows which are in a split container of a background tab.

Tabs, and workspaces.

Re: Niri – A scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor

#198

Post by WhyNotHugo »

baq wrote: post #6

I'm basically fullscreen with everything all the time on macos, but not in the super-duper-fullscreen mode so cmd-tab/cmd-` works predictably. I want this on macos. I know I can't have it on macos. I also can't switch to Linux since macos is mandated by my employer. Nothing really to take out of it except that I feel like I'm not alone feeling stuck, knowing there are better workflows and not being able to do anythin…

> I know I can't have it on macos. I also can't switch to Linux since macos is mandated by my employer.

I’ve had two employers with dumb rules like this and I just worked on a Linux VM running fullscreen on all monitors. It was technically macOS, so IT didn’t have any issues, and it still ran all the security stuff that my employer wanted. At one job, my manager even provisioned a VMWare license for this.

Re: Niri – A scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor

#199

Post by cycomanic »

1337shadow wrote: post #188
hagbard_c wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been running Xmonad for about 16 years and, having read the description and watched the video think I will keep on doing so. It looks to me like the cognitive load of the horizontally scrolling strip is higher than that of the paged approach used by e.g. Xmonad just like it is a lot harder to locate a specific section in a vertically scrolling unpaged ream of text than in a paged book. Especially on pages with m…

Well it does look beautiful but I don't think I can go back to anything that's un-paged neither, after 17 years of dwm. Also, just watched a bit of an XMonad demo which reminded me how much I love the simplicity of dwm's tiling workflow based on having a master window per page (dwm's tag) because it completely removed the burden of window management for me with barely any configuration, I wonder how I'd do without it…

What do you mean by un-paged? I just looked at dwm and I don't see that it has anything that other tiling wms don't have. Xmonad, i3, sway... all have workspaces/tags.

Niri also has named workspaces, but when I switched to niri, I realised I only want named workspaces for very few things everything else is just temporary.

Re: Niri – A scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor

#200

Post by evgpbfhnr »

wongogue wrote: post #141
evgpbfhnr wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and no; the difference with workspace is that I was limited to 0-9 with my old wm, so at some point I'd just run out of space and had to close some windows. (well, that, and X11 is apparently limited to 256 clients by default and I never changed that; but I rarely hit that limit :P) I do have some struts on the side, but I'm basically always juggling with at least 4 or 5 tasks so I always have things open; (I'm n…

The latest release exposes information about windows list and positions via API. Someone can write a widget for waybar or any other bar.

Oh! That didn't exist a few months ago, I need to update and do this then :D
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