Has anyone here that used a #TilingWindowManager previously given #Niri a shot and not gone back ?What are you thoughts on Niri compared to the likes of #RiverWM or #SwayWM ?I've been reading through their repo and I'm almost tempted to give it a whirl...
-
Has anyone here that used a #TilingWindowManager previously given #Niri a shot and not gone back ?
What are you thoughts on Niri compared to the likes of #RiverWM or #SwayWM ?
I've been reading through their repo and I'm almost tempted to give it a whirl.
https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri -
Gergely Nagy 🐁replied to Justine Smithies last edited by
@justine Since I've been tagged: hi! I'm a #niri convert, and have converted half my family too, and we're all very happy. I can't really compare it to Sway or River, because I used Sway for a total of about an hour, and while I wanted to try River, I tried niri first, and stuck with it since.
In ages past, I used ratpoison and awesomewm, and liked them both, and always thought that tiling was My Thing, but none of the WMs I tried quite clicked. I couldn't really pinpoint why at the time, but there was always some small annoyance that built up slowly, and I eventually went back to GNOME, and came up with my own hacks to avoid the need of a tiling WM.
When I decided to give Wayland a try, I had to find an alternative, because the hacks I made for GNOME relied on features that simply weren't available under wayland (I made heavy use of xprops, devilspie2, and wmctrl, among other things). My workflow on GNOME was that almost every window was maximized, and I wrote a tool to "tag" them: so I could hide and show all windows with a given tag, at any time. This let me context switch easily. I was looking for something similar on Wayland.
My short-list ended up being River (which had tagging, although more limited than what I had in mind), and niri. I tried niri first, because I had the suspicion that whichever I go with, I'll have to contribute at least a little to make it do what I want it to do, and I was more familiar with Rust. (I ended up contributing named workspace support)
niri was very different from anything I've tried before, the scrolling was an entirely new concept to me. However, niri made me realize almost immediately what my problem was with all other tiling WMs I tried before: they all resized existing windows. I never wanted to resize existing windows. New windows? Yeah, I'll make them fit (usually by automating the process)! But when a new window opens, I never want existing windows to resize.
That is the super power scrolling gave me. I can have any number of workspaces (some named, some dynamic), have window rules to automatically move windows to their intended workspace, to resize them to the size I want them to be, and so on. And existing windows will remain the same size. Sure, the viewport may scroll to the newly opened window, but that's okay! None of the others changed size, nor position - only the viewport moved. I fell in love within an hour.
With niri, I can open a dozen windows on the same workspace, and won't have to think about how to fit them into the constraints of my screen, or which workspace to move them to to not be in a way, and I'd still remember where they are.
On top of this, it also has some very nice features I didn't know I needed.
Rainbow gradient borders? They look cute on my active window! Gives them a hint of whimsy, without being overly annoying.
Animations? I love that when I open a window, it spins in, and when I close one, it gently falls off the screen. I barely notice it, but every time I look at it, it fills me with joy. (It can also do some wild stuff, which I had a lot of fun playing with!)
It can also block out some windows from screenshots & screencasts (under some conditions, but my use-cases happen to fall under those conditions, so yay!), so I don't have to close the family chat before hopping on a video call or stuff like that. -
Justine Smithiesreplied to Gergely Nagy 🐁 last edited by
@algernon Wow thank you so much for your detailed thoughts on Niri. I've just installed it and intend to give it a fair go so fingers crossed.
-
Gergely Nagy 🐁replied to Justine Smithies last edited by
@justine I can also recommend joining their matrix room, many helpful folk lurk there.
I hope you'll find in niri what you're looking for - or at least, some ideas or good memories to bring elsewhere