[HN Gopher] The Future Is Niri
___________________________________________________________________
The Future Is Niri
Author : mattjhall
Score : 299 points
Date : 2025-03-12 11:42 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ersei.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (ersei.net)
| evanjrowley wrote:
| 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
| 20after4 wrote:
| 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 of
| list of running apps. - Xwayland (for seamlessly running x11
| applications)
|
| All of these functions must be provided by other separate tools
| that are not included with niri.
|
| My biggest complaint is the lack of clipboard synchronization
| between x11 and Wayland. I guess that gnome handles this
| automatically but it's not so in niri - Wayland apps have
| independent clipboard and inability copy paste between Wayland
| and x11 is very annoying.
|
| There are workarounds but none that I've tried so far are
| satisfactorily convenient and reliable.
| MadnessASAP wrote:
| It's the distinction between a "window manager" and a
| "desktop environment" KDE/Gnome/XFCE are DEs that include
| window managers (KWin/Mutter/xfwm4) along with a suite of
| other utilities that make up the complete environment.
|
| Conversely, Sway, Niri, Hyprland, i3 are bare window
| managers. They do not include the suite of tools and it is
| left up to the user to build their environment as they wish.
| Fortunately thanks to some defined (FreeDesktop.org & Wayland
| are big) and defacto standards there is a reasonable degree
| of interoperability for tools. For myself I pull a decent
| chunk of the XFCE suite into my Sway config to make my very
| own, special little environment. A environment that
| apparently no one else can even begin to figure out how to
| use but at least nobody asks to borrow my laptop twice.
| arghwhat wrote:
| Niri is cool, but was the drag issue reported? :/
|
| sway 1.10 is from october, 1.10.1 is a bugfix from late january.
| Since they're talking about git bisect, I imagine they might be
| running master (i.e., bleeding edge) instead of stable
| releases...
| freedomben wrote:
| They did mention that they asked for help in IRC. Not the same
| thing as a bug report of course, but worth mentioning.
| arghwhat wrote:
| Yeah that's fair, but a lot of people are quite... impatient
| on IRC, ignoring that those able to answer might be busy or
| in a different timezone altogether. Debugging an issue
| requires at the very least the effort to reproduce it, and if
| the person doesn't already bring a trivial reproduction this
| can at times be a painful and time-consuming project to
| extract, and that time is not always available right at that
| instant.
|
| Coming in with a prepared and easy reproduction and a filed
| issue makes quite a difference in the response you'll get.
|
| (For the record, I don't experience anything matching what
| they describe on master right now, but the post was more
| about PaperWM vs. tiling UX so that doesn't matter that
| much.)
| xpe wrote:
| A fun read. Everyone has their breaking point...
|
| > Naturally, instead of figuring out what library made a breaking
| change and spending four hours running git bisect, I decided to
| throw nearly a decade of muscle-memory and workflow refinements
| out the window.
| z0r wrote:
| I enjoyed this post but I'm going to keep using xmonad (and X)
| until I can port my configuration to a wayland equivalent (if
| that is even possible)
| bilekas wrote:
| > The worst "street-cred" I have is that I've been using tiling
| window managers for thirty-five percent of my life: five years
| with Sway and two with i3. As the realization of those numbers
| (and my age) dawns upon me
|
| The author is ~21 and seems worried they're old ? I had a good
| giggle about that.. And then it dawned upon me how old I
| _actually_ am.
| kisonecat wrote:
| As a 40-something year old person who used ratpoison more than
| 21 years ago... Yeah, I feel super old now.
| vinceguidry wrote:
| Man I miss those days. I felt so cool sitting in coffee shops
| with a 10 year old ThinkPad running ratpoison on Gentoo.
| int_19h wrote:
| Ratpoison is surprisingly good on small laptops, where
| everything is usually maximized anyway.
| dimatura wrote:
| A nice side benefit is that ratpoison is its own screen
| lock (for 99% of people).
| celsius1414 wrote:
| No need to feel super old!
|
| /cries in half century
|
| Reminds me of that explanation for why the years seem to move
| much faster when you're older. When you're 10, five years is
| half your life. When you're 50, it's only 10%.
| dimatura wrote:
| I still use ratpoison, dreading the day it stops working for
| whatever reason (wayland being a likely one). Haven't tried
| it, but Cagebreak (https://github.com/project-repo/cagebreak)
| seems like a possible successor.
| WillowWithAWand wrote:
| Yeah when I did the math on that I was like "oh so you're
| basically a child!"
| cafeinux wrote:
| Same here, I was actually reading the comments to see if
| someone had the same reaction. I'm not even much older than
| them, but enough that I look at 20 yo people as if they were
| inexperienced children.
|
| This being said, time for my daily nitpicking: 7/0.35=20, not
| ~21. Although I agree that 20 [?] 21.
| linsomniac wrote:
| Yeah, I read that and was thinking "Oh, were they using dwm?"
| Then the next sentence: "Oooh, they're a pup!" :-) Dude, I've
| had my current job for over 50% of your life. I guess my street
| cred is I've been using Unix around as long as your parents
| have been alive.
| romforth wrote:
| I've been faithfully using the same window manager [olvwm] for
| ~30 years and counting. In fact the decision about which
| [distro] I pick for daily use is totally dependent on whether
| it can be coaxed into running [xview]+olvwm.
|
| [olvwm]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olvwm [distro]:
| https://ces.mataroa.blog/blog/distro_hoppingmd [xview]:
| https://github.com/olvwm/xview
| pjerem wrote:
| Now that's what I call being retro :)
| evandrofisico wrote:
| I've been using my current window manager (fluxbox) for far
| more years than he's been alive. Now talk about muscle memory!
| bikitan wrote:
| At the same time, the author refers to things like "decades" of
| muscle memory and finishing "all of college." I wonder if
| there's just an error somewhere?!
| andrewla wrote:
| This looks really intriguing and I'm looking forward to using it.
|
| I'm still using i3, which is just barely good enough to work.
|
| I miss Notion, which was unfortunately too flakey and unstable to
| continue using, but that had one property which it looks like
| Niri preserves -- opening a new window will never cause a resize
| event. Notion is perhaps even stronger because there is no
| infinite canvas; opening a new window will never cause a re-
| layout. It will always open in a tab or a blank space. Similarly,
| moving windows won't cause re-layout actions; it will just move
| them between tabs of existing frames.
|
| My i3 configuration tried to preserve this -- it tries to make
| everything tabbed by default so that moving windows will just
| move between tabs rather than into new blanks spaces and cause a
| relayout action, but sometimes, for some reason, it just ... does
| not, and instead opens a new split.
|
| I tried to make xmonad work but I'm not good enough at Haskell to
| figure out if it was even possible to configure it the way I
| want.
| the_gipsy wrote:
| I would like to know, coming from a traditional tiling window
| manager, how does the shortcut workflow look like?
|
| For me the number one thing is having fixed shortcuts a la
| Super+[0-9] to go to specific windows / workspaces / essentially
| a specific program. If I can have that, and additionally solving
| the "worskpace management" problem as TFA described, I'm sold!
|
| Does it make sense to use "workspaces" like this with Niri? For
| example, one workspace with the browser, one with the editor, one
| with several terminal columns, and so on. I would need to
| "switch" (immediately, without animation effects, please) e.g.
| from "browser" to "terminals".
| tripdout wrote:
| Yes, Niri still supports numbered workspaces in the same was as
| WMs like Sway. It's just that now you can scroll them
| horizontally too.
| stevefolta wrote:
| The one caveat -- and it's a big one -- is that Niri numbers
| workspaces dynamically, and won't let you have an empty
| workspace (except temporarily).
| rwdf wrote:
| You can have named workspaces now, I have ones dedicated to
| terminals, and browsers. They always have the same numbers.
| stevefolta wrote:
| Oh, perfect, thanks! I've been using Niri for less than a
| week, hadn't got to using named workspaces yet, and
| missed the bit in the docs where it says they can be
| empty.
| redactyl wrote:
| I find I use Niri in a similar way to other tiling WMs, but
| instead of having one application per workspace, it lets me
| keep accessory applications clustered with the main ones. For
| example, my password manager lives in the same workspace
| (usually off-screen) as my browser. Whenever I need to generate
| a password or something, it's right there. Same with whatever
| accessory terminals I need in addition to my text editor.
| bsnnkv wrote:
| Unfortunately tiling window managers for Linux have become quite
| stagnant in terms of improving and iterating on workflows, which
| is probably why we're seeing more of the kind of sentiment
| expressed in this post lately (of course, the poor backwards
| compatibility story is not helping either)
|
| The Windows scene is definitely the place where the most
| interesting workflow advances in "traditional" tiling window
| managers are happening right now.
| pona-a wrote:
| Can you point to any innovative Windows tiling WMs and explain
| what "workflow advances" it makes? All I found was FancyWM, and
| it seems basically identical to i3.
| bsnnkv wrote:
| I'm on a phone for most of today so I won't be making the
| kind of lengthy reply you're asking for, but you can check
| out komorebi and jwno if you're genuinely interested
| slightwinder wrote:
| I don't see any real innovation with those WM. It looks
| like they are just migrating the features of advanced
| Linux-WMs to the windows-world, in their own way.
|
| Can you name any specific features you are considering as
| innovative?
| bsnnkv wrote:
| The main ones that I'm still waiting to see integrated
| into mainstream Linux twms are workspace scrolling (of
| course), dynamic layout rules and dynamic offset rules
| (important for ultrawide monitor users).
|
| I'd also like to see container limit rules to enforce
| stacking after meeting a threshold (functions as a hard
| cap on tiles-per-workspace), and native support for
| Vimium-style shortcuts for every UI element on the screen
| (from jwno), but I could probably live without these.
|
| I wouldn't call these particularly innovative features,
| in fact they are pretty low hanging fruit.
| slightwinder wrote:
| > dynamic layout rules and dynamic offset rules
| (important for ultrawide monitor users).
|
| What is dynamic offset? And what are you missing from the
| existing layouts the existing dynamic WMs already
| deliver?
|
| > and native support for Vimium-style shortcuts for every
| UI element on the screen (from jwno), but I could
| probably live without these.
|
| Isn't this impossible with Linux, as the WM has no
| control over the application on that level? Maybe through
| accessibility-settings you can gain them on a per app-
| basis. But this seems more a problem of Desktop
| Environments than Window Managers.
| bsnnkv wrote:
| Since we're >5 layers deep in the thread tree, feel free
| to hit me up off-platform if you'd like to discuss this
| more. Again, I'm on my phone today and limited in how
| much detail I can respond in - but if you are interested
| enough to dig into the documentation and video resources
| available you'll find the answers to all of these
| questions and more.
| strobe wrote:
| I thought moving from i3/x11 to sway/wayland but from this post
| is looks like screen sharing still not resolved yet completely on
| wayland. How much time is worth to wait until UX with wayland
| will be good enough to not worry about that kind stuff?
| Propelloni wrote:
| I can't say how much time it is worth to you, sorry. What I can
| say is that screen sharing works fine under Wayland and Gnome
| for me (AMD hardware all the way), so I'm inclined to say that
| Wayland is not the showstopper here.
| freedomben wrote:
| Same. Screensharing under Wayland/Gnome with AMD hardware all
| the way has been working great for quite some time
| strobe wrote:
| thanks, good to know.
|
| anyway, if one of the majors tiling wm managers struggling to
| share specific window it looks like it could be more edge
| cases like that. Probably, I can deal with those things but I
| fully understand struggle of this article author so just
| wanna upgrade to it when possibility of struggle will be
| minimal for me.
| drcongo wrote:
| That video immediately made me wish this was available for Mac,
| it seemed to fit my brain's model of how things should be.
| 256 wrote:
| there's https://github.com/mogenson/PaperWM.spoon (i haven't
| tried it)
| loveiswork wrote:
| It's not quite the same as Niri, but in case you haven't seen
| there is _A_ tiling window manager for Mac: Amethyst
|
| No 'endless scrolling' aspect, but I find it works great for
| managing window sizing and bopping around your windows via
| keyboard.
| incanus77 wrote:
| 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
| OsrsNeedsf2P wrote:
| 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..
| drcongo wrote:
| Should have mentioned that I use Moom at the moment on Mac, and
| I love it. It's that scrolling paradigm that interests me here
| though.
| ollybee wrote:
| I've been using sway daily since before it was really stable and
| recently tried Niri but maybe couldn't get over the muscle memory
| from sway. I use sway mostly in tabbed mode anyway which gives a
| similar feel to a scrolling WM but with flexibility to break out
| to tiles in a different workspace if needed.
|
| What has massively improved my workflow recently is vertical tabs
| in Firefox. I now have browser tabs I can cycle up and down
| through on side of my screen, and application tabs I can cycle
| through left and right at the top. I love it.
| cafeinux wrote:
| This seems interesting. I've been thinking lately of re-
| installing a tilling WM on my daily driver because I have a wide
| screen and I spend more time rearranging and searching for
| windows than doing actual things on it. Also, it seems that all
| that screen estate could be put to better use with a tilling WM.
| Guess I'll give Niri a try, maybe it will fit my needs.
| kemaru wrote:
| 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 structure, very easy to understand and
| start hacking.
| pmarreck wrote:
| would a widescreen make this better or worse? (I like to work
| in UWQHD.)
| qalmakka wrote:
| I just can't wrap my head around tiling WMs (and I've been doing
| Linux since a _long_ time ago). I just don't see how usable they
| can be when you have a "small" screen to be honest.
| aarroyoc wrote:
| I use Niri at home and PaperWM at work but I use most apps
| maximized. The thing that I like is that I can move between
| windows in a WASD like shortcut, more convenient that doing
| Alt-Tab. However vertical split is also very easy to do in Niri
| and it's sometimes very convenient.
| broken-kebab wrote:
| But keyboard-driven workflow is not a property of _tiling_
| WMs. You can re-configure window switching in many WMs to be
| whatever you like
| darthrupert wrote:
| Vice versa for me: I cannot understand how people with small
| screens can use anything but tiling.
| riquito wrote:
| More often than not you keep just one or two windows visible in
| the screen, and switch to another app with <super>+<number> or
| similar. Since you use most apps fullscreen, the small screen
| doesn't feel so small anymore. Feels good, honestly
| thesuitonym wrote:
| That's cool, homie, maybe it's just not for you. Personally,
| while I understand the appeal, it's just not for me.
| broken-kebab wrote:
| Frankly, mate, the answer is a bit too hipsterish. Of "you
| won't understand true underground anyway" sort. We're talking
| about productivity tools, if there are advantages they can be
| described even if subjectively.
| thom wrote:
| Lots of tasks involve two different apps (googling a bug while
| looking at the error, reading a spec while working on the code,
| being on a call while showing off a document etc). I'm almost
| always happier with two full monitors, but I use tiling when
| I'm stuck on a single laptop screen for example. I rarely want
| more than two things at once unless I'm in Emacs, and I
| sometimes get the sense that a lot of tiling window manager and
| tmux use is just people not knowing how to use their editor's
| built in window management and multi-process support. Obviously
| everyone's free to build their own environment however they
| like, I don't know why anyone would accept being stuck on a
| tiny screen for long periods though!
| cnqso wrote:
| I'm a hyprland zoomer but I used Niri for a bit and it worked
| pretty well. It slots in perfectly for someone coming from an
| average single-monitor Windows workflow (for most office-style
| tasks). I still think that more complex tiling setups have a
| higher productivity ceiling though. I guess if you're like this
| guy and keep >10 workspaces open at once you'd have to go with
| Niri. I wonder if the increased battery life would still hold for
| someone that only keeps a few windows open at once. 2 hours is
| insane from just a change of wm
| BirAdam wrote:
| Having heard about Niri previously, I really didn't like the
| sound of it. Seeing the movement with hotkeys shown with each
| movement... well... that completely changed my perspective. I
| will have to give it a try.
| TylerE wrote:
| Funny, I'm the opposite. The idea is intriguing, but I
| absolutely do not want animated. I have vision issues and
| animation just makes everything go (more) blurry.
| wging wrote:
| There's apparently a config setting to turn all animations
| off, though I haven't tried it myself.
|
| The author linked their config file from the article, and it
| includes this: // Animation settings.
| animations { // Uncomment to turn off all
| animations. // off
|
| I think it's boilerplate from the default config file, which
| would imply that the video they showed is not the 'animations
| off' version, if that's not already clear from the presence
| of animations.
| dkersten wrote:
| This looks interesting and I'll probably give it a try.
|
| I've been using Sway for the last five years and i3 for a few
| years previously. They work fairly well for me, I certainly
| didn't have any of the problems the OP mentioned.
|
| My all time favourite window manager, though, and one I wish
| would be revived (perhaps as a wayland WM now. How I wish I had
| the free time to take this on...) is GOOMWWM which I used for a
| decade prior to i3 (and Musca before that).
| tycho-newman wrote:
| When I was in my 20s, I was all in on Compiz. Whatever happened
| to it?
| onli wrote:
| There were some forks and merges already back then that
| probably did not help. Then Canoncial hired the main dev, with
| the main project not surviving far beyond his later departure.
| Official end point for the project seems to have been
| https://www.phoronix.com/news/MTI2ODU, in 2012 and mentioning
| Wayland as reason (as if that were anywhere close back then).
|
| But actually, the launchpad repo has recent commits (or do I
| read https://code.launchpad.net/~compiz-
| team/compiz/+git/compiz/+... wrong), and so does
| https://github.com/compiz-reloaded. You can still just use one
| of those if you want - Void Linux for example has it packaged,
| and so does Ubuntu.
| film42 wrote:
| It's still around but not in active development. Tiling window
| managers like i3 are just a window manager, but you can add
| compiz as your compositor to wobble if you want. I think
| compton is still the most popular "just good enough" compositor
| used by i3 users (it's what I use). Sway is both a compositor
| and a window manager.
| haswell wrote:
| Worth mentioning that https://wayfire.org/ is a spiritual
| successor that runs in Wayland.
| depingus wrote:
| KDE users might be interested in Karousel. A Kwin script that
| also does scrollable tiling windows in KDE.
| https://github.com/peterfajdiga/karousel
| DarkCrusader2 wrote:
| Does anyone know the best way to get some tiling behavior in
| tradition DEs like Cinnamon.
|
| Some basic things like notifications, keyboard controls for
| volume/brightness, sound etc don't work the best in i3wm by
| default and requires some fiddling on each machine to get it to
| work properly.
|
| I love the out of the box behavior of my Mint installation and
| don't want to switch completely to something like i3wm. I could
| get even a watered down version tiling and stacking like i3 with
| keyboard shortcuts, I would be very happy. There is gTile but it
| doesn't quite work the same way.
| dingnuts wrote:
| Not sure about Cinnamon, which is a pet project by Linux Mint,
| but Gnome and Kwin offer some options these days:
|
| https://github.com/ellysaurus/KWin-TilingGuide/
|
| https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM
|
| https://github.com/peterfajdiga/karousel
|
| there might be more
| Starlevel004 wrote:
| I tried using Niri but the per-monitor workspace behaviour is
| completely unacceptable to me. I don't use a laptop.
| anarcat wrote:
| can you expand on that? how does it compare to sway, for
| example? what's unacceptable and acceptable for you?
| Starlevel004 wrote:
| Sway (and most other tiling) WMs have the same behaviour;
| i.e., each monitor has its own unique set of workspaces
| instead of one workspace being shared across monitors.
| Workspaces not being persistent also messed with me, I have
| eight workspaces all divvied up for exact purposes and
| sometimes the ones inbetween are empty.
|
| I use labwc currently which has the ideal workspace behaviour
| (one workspace shared).
| anarcat wrote:
| right, those are the two ways.
|
| and how does niri do it? a workspace is shared among all
| monitor, or it's one workspace per monitor?
| ahub wrote:
| Coming from the same background as the author and about _checks
| notes_ 15 years older (ouch), I loved Niri very much. However I
| never managed to make x11 windows behave correctly. At the moment
| the solutions are a bit cumbersome [0] and I didn 't manage to
| have a smooth experience so far...
|
| [0] https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/wiki/Xwayland
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| I don't have a lot of practice with it, but what problems did
| you have with xwayland-satellite? It really seems like you just
| run it and everything magically works
| jackbravo wrote:
| Is there something equivalent or similar for MacOS? This seems
| great!
|
| I use (and pay) for the magnet app, I don't like the native
| fullscreen functionality or split screen options.
| jackbravo wrote:
| Ha! The niri README has an answer for this,
| https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri, it is
| https://github.com/mogenson/PaperWM.spoon, "Tiled scrollable
| window manager for MacOS".
| phildenhoff wrote:
| Thanks! As soon as I saw Niri I wondered if there was a macOS
| alternative.
|
| Aerospace has a similar resizing glitch as PaperWM.spoon:
| resizing one direction ends up looking wonky if you do it
| fast enough. It's noticeable at the end of the smooth
| scrolling demo. That must be a macOS thing...
|
| I may check out PaperWM.spoon at some point but realistically
| I'll set up a VM and try out Niri
| mrbluecoat wrote:
| I think the post should be retitled "The Future Is Niri [for
| people who never touch their mouse and instead like memorizing
| keyboard shortcuts]"
|
| (watch the bottom-right readout on the video)
| dhrm1k wrote:
| funny I got to know about ersei from Purdue linux group's members
| list and here he is on the frontpage of hn.
| sunshine-o wrote:
| Scrollable WMs are really terrific because you get about 80% of
| the productivity benefits of a tiling WM with 20% of the effort.
|
| I am puzzeled by the fact it took us 30-40 years to figure it out
| !
| alabastervlog wrote:
| I watched the video on the site and this looks like absolute
| hell, as someone who uses drag-n-drop between programs fairly
| often.
|
| I'm also someone whose open browser tabs tend to grow
| indefinitely until I just have to bookmark and close all
| hundred of them or whatever, so... yeah, this entire paradigm
| looks _extremely_ not for me.
| sunshine-o wrote:
| > this looks like absolute hell, as someone who uses drag-n-
| drop between programs fairly often
|
| The way people use it is you constantly reorder windows
| according to your workflow so DnD is not a problem.
|
| > I'm also someone whose open browser tabs tend to grow
| indefinitely until I just have to bookmark and close all
| hundred of them or whatever
|
| I agree the tab model is an horror. The problem is for most
| people the tabs are their browsing history, with a visual
| clutter.
|
| My guess is there is an huge opportunity for rethinking the
| whole web browser history/tab model.
| sureglymop wrote:
| Another thing I hate especially in firefox is that one
| can't pin tabs on the right, next to the newest tabs and
| the new tabs button. So often one has to keep one or two
| tabs open but otherwise open many new ones to research
| something.
| tasuki wrote:
| 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?
| bootsmann wrote:
| I use this too, the keybinds carry to windows which is very
| convenient. I get stunlocked by muscle memory when working in
| macos tho.
| tiagod wrote:
| Try out Rectangle. You can set keybinds to match what you're
| used to.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| 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.
| kingnothing wrote:
| 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...
| alabastervlog wrote:
| 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.
| callahad wrote:
| This covers binding Cmd+Opt+[Arrows, F, C], which is all
| I use: defaults write -g
| NSUserKeyEquivalents -dict-add \
| "\033Window\033Move & Resize\033Left" "@~\\U2190" \
| "\033Window\033Move & Resize\033Right" "@~\\U2192" \
| "\033Window\033Move & Resize\033Top" "@~\\U2191" \
| "\033Window\033Move & Resize\033Bottom" "@~\\U2193" \
| "\033Window\033Fill" "@~F" \
| "\033Window\033Center" "@~C"
|
| Equivalent to manually binding in System Settings ->
| Keyboard -> Keyboard Shortcuts -> App Shortcuts
| alabastervlog wrote:
| Ah, looks promising, and I bet I can figure out how to
| add the rest with that as an example and some light Web
| searching.
|
| I use all of those except center, plus Cmd+Ctrl+[left,
| right] for top quarters left and right, and
| Cmd+Ctrl+Shift+[left, right] for lower quarters left and
| right.
|
| Thanks!
| floriannn wrote:
| There is a maintained fork called "Rectangle" now.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| I thought that was a totally different program, not a fork?
| If it's a fork, I guess that simplifies figuring out which
| alternative to switch to the first time Spectacle gives me
| any trouble at all.
| floriannn wrote:
| https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle
|
| It says "based on" in the README, which could just mean
| "inspired by", but it's also in the license so I thought
| that it was an actual fork. Looking at the actual history
| would reveal the answer, but idk, works basically the
| same.
| 4ndrewl wrote:
| Quarters? You deviant!
| ok_dad wrote:
| I must also be a caveman, I have at most 4 windows open, they
| are pretty much full screen, and I swap between them with a
| mouse. I don't even have that many browser tabs open at any
| given time, maybe 5-10 max. I feel old when I see kids these
| days using fancy window managers with custom ergo keyboards and
| no mice, while they hack away in neovim (is that still cool?)
| and chat on a platform I don't even know exists yet.
| freedomben wrote:
| 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
| vindex10 wrote:
| Did you see Pop OS?
|
| https://pop.system76.com/
|
| They follow ubuntu releases, kind of. The downside, they went
| all in into their new desktop env - cosmic, and until they
| release it they won't move on from 20.04..
|
| I really loved the tiling feature in PopOS 20.04 which came
| out of the box. But then I bought a new laptop, and had to
| move to arch to use it..
| Vinnl wrote:
| I'd really like someone to implement
| https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2023/07/26/rethinking-
| windo...
| rob74 wrote:
| I used to do that when I had a two-monitor setup - one full-
| screen window per monitor. Now that I have one 4K monitor I
| usually have two windows side by side, and very occasionally
| quartered (sometimes of course also one window on one side and
| two on the other). Not sure if this "workflow" would lend
| itself to a tiling window manager (never tried one), because
| some of the windows are also stacked?
| speckx wrote:
| I do this, but on KDE. Occasionally, I need four horizontal
| windows since I'm on an ultrawide, so I use the built-in KWin
| tiling (https://planet.kde.org/marco-martin-2022-10-31-kwin-
| and-tili...).
| IshKebab wrote:
| Me too. For most things I want all the screen space for the one
| thing I'm working on. Occasionally I need to look at two
| things. I almost never need to look at more than two things and
| I don't have a 100" screen anyway so there wouldn't be space.
| ohgr wrote:
| This is how I use my Mac desktop with Rectangle
| https://rectangleapp.com
|
| That and the apple touchpad to swipe three fingers left and
| right to switch desktops (and different machines as one desktop
| is remote desked into a windows box and another terminal+tmux
| session to a linux box).
| maelito wrote:
| My biggest problem with wayland was support for french
| characters. So annoying, so basic. L'accent circonflexe ne
| marchait pas.
|
| Last time I tried, a few weeks ago, it wasn't better.
| gautamcgoel wrote:
| Just out of curiosity, what issues do you encounter? Doesn't
| Wayland support Unicode?
| flkiwi wrote:
| 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_.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > I tried to use niri, but I couldn't get it working on NixOS.
|
| Couldn't get what to work? Like, you switch to a VT, run
| nix-shell -p niri niri
|
| and it crashes, or...?
| flkiwi wrote:
| There was, at the time, some sort of issue with the flake.
| So, really, I couldn't get it running with flakes. I should
| really try it again.
| bulatb wrote:
| _> That is almost certainly user error on my part_
|
| If an interested and reasonably savvy person can't get a
| program to work as it claims, the problem is the program, not
| the user.
| sroussey wrote:
| This looks like some headset UI designs to me.
|
| Viture comes to mind.
| haswell wrote:
| 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 ;)
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| 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.
| lll-o-lll wrote:
| 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.
| 75902846575 wrote:
| There are floating WMs with multiple workspaces you can
| switch between with hotkeys. It's not a feature exclusive
| to tiling WMs.
| jdiez17 wrote:
| 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.
| presto8 wrote:
| Would alttab meet your needs? I've been using it with xmonad
| and it works well. https://github.com/sagb/alttab
| jdiez17 wrote:
| That seems to be X11 only, so not really. It should also be
| workspace-aware.
| specproc wrote:
| 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.
| freedomben wrote:
| What are some of the most interesting WMs in your opinion?
| thugcee wrote:
| For X11: Binary Space Partitioning WM
| https://github.com/baskerville/bspwm
| PuercoPop wrote:
| wmii[0], it implements the acme window layout. But the
| interesting part is that it exposes its state as a file-
| system. The main loop is a shell script[1]. So BYO posible,
| fe here is a Ruby one [2]
|
| [0]: https://github.com/0intro/wmii [1]:
| https://github.com/0intro/wmii/blob/main/cmd/wmii.rc.rc [2]:
| https://github.com/sunaku/wmiirc
| PixelForg wrote:
| 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.
| ge96 wrote:
| where's i3 gaps and the ricing
| crabbone wrote:
| I use stumpwm. The reason is to have fewer features. In the few
| years I've used it, I never wanted to select text with mouse
| (although sometimes I had no choice, eg. in PDF), but even then,
| I never wanted to drag it with the mouse (and I never needed to
| do that). I don't even know if that would work, and even if it
| doesn't--wouldn't care...
|
| If I didn't need a Web browser and a PDF reader I wouldn't be
| running X at all... I wish there was a usable alternative for the
| browser and PDF reader that didn't require X...
| WeZzyNL wrote:
| It's X11 but whenever (tiling) window managers are mentioned, I
| feel a strong urge to mention Herbstluftwm [0]. It's more manual
| than the automatic splitting most tiling WMs do but I really
| enjoy how easy it is to split/tab using the keyboard in
| Herbstluftwm.
|
| [0] https://herbstluftwm.org/
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| How did we get to a place where a major popular piece of software
| like this will provide binary packaging for basically every
| distribution _other_ than Debian (and, by extension, Ubuntu)?
| This feels out of step with the last 30 years of Linux software
| development... These are very popular distributions...
| eximius wrote:
| Glad to see Smithay has approached a point that lots of things
| are being built on it. Last I really deeply looked at all this
| was when Way Cooler abandoned wlroots-rs.
|
| And to my pleasant surprise, it seems like there may finally be
| an AwesomeWM alternative for Wayland now! (Pinnacle)
| Ferret7446 wrote:
| I think i3/sway has deceived a lot of people into thinking that
| tiling means manual tiling. Having to manually split and arrange
| your windows is not how tiling is supposed to work.
| pkulak wrote:
| I switched from Sway to River and have been very happy.
| However, I noticed Niri when it came out, and was extremely
| intrigued. Haven't check back in since, but it looks like the
| project is still humming along, which is awesome. I may have to
| check it out.
| koiueo wrote:
| Deceived?
|
| I knew I prefer manual tiling since the very moment I tried
| wmii. It was the first time tiling made sense to me, and it was
| a major productivity booster on my 12" laptop. On such small
| screen I can't care less about all those spiral, bsp and other
| tiling schemes automatic twms offer.
| boomskats wrote:
| The _only_ thing I feel Niri still needs is this:
| https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/discussions/352#discussioncom...
|
| Otherwise it is the perfect endgame UX for me. Regardless of
| screen size or form factor. I never thought I'd find something
| that I liked better than i3/sway, but those subtle niri
| animations, at double speed? On a high refresh rate monitor, w/
| amdgpu? Ahh. Chef's kiss <3
| mmgutz wrote:
| Niri is RAM efficient. I run Niri in an 8GB VM on Intel Macbook,
| and on a $99 8GB mini PC. Total RAM usage on boot is less than
| 400MB with waybar, polkit, ssh-agent, mako ... That's in the
| ultra lightweight WM category. Compare that to Gnome+paperwm
| (1.6GB)
|
| There are features Niri sorely needs: 1) 2D overview (zoom
| in/out), 2) enhanced meta for windows (to create window indicator
| [1] and window picker)
| 75902846575 wrote:
| We're calling 400MB RAM usage ultra-lightweight now? OpenBox
| needs 7MB of RAM, and there are WMs that are even lighter on
| memory requirements.
|
| > Compare that to Gnome+paperwm (1.6GB)
|
| Anything seems lightweight if you compare it to a DE well known
| for its bloat.
| mmgutz wrote:
| Niri doesn't use 400MB by itself, that's the entire memory
| footprint of everything running. In comparison, OpenBox with
| all the utilities needed for wallet, ssh agent etc is in the
| 450MB range on my box. That's probably due X11 vs Wayland.
|
| A minimal Niri functional environment is similar to IceWM in
| RAM usage. I used to run antiX in VMs.
| arp242 wrote:
| > We're calling 400MB RAM usage ultra-lightweight now?
| OpenBox needs 7MB of RAM, and there are WMs that are even
| lighter on memory requirements.
|
| My WM uses 1,158K of RAM, or basically just a bit above 1M.
| This is a very minimal custom thing I wrote years ago that
| works for me.
|
| But the previous person said "total RAM usage on boot". I was
| curious enough to reboot: on boot my Linux system uses 310M.
| That's without Xorg and starting only some very minimal
| services. After startx it uses about 405M.
|
| "RAM usage" is a tricky topic. I have 32G on my machine and
| there's no memory pressure at all on boot, so the kernel can
| just allocate/cache stuff "just in case", but it doesn't
| necessarily _need_ all that memory to allocate.
| klardotsh wrote:
| > We're calling 400MB RAM usage ultra-lightweight now?
| OpenBox needs 7MB of RAM, and there are WMs that are even
| lighter on memory requirements.
|
| How much is your X server process using? Because a Wayland
| compositor has to be both the display server and the WM in
| one. Comparing OpenBox alone to Niri is incomplete and
| incorrect, you have to compare OpenBox+Xorg+(xcompmgr or
| whatever frame-perfect compositor) to get a 1:1-ish
| comparison.
| sureglymop wrote:
| I just use gnome with pop-shell (though on arch). Been using it
| for years and never had issues with it. For me it's always felt
| nicer to have a tiling wm on top of something like gnome.
| mmgutz wrote:
| Gnome is starting on a built-in mosaic layout tiler that looks
| on the surface similar to newm. newm is sadly no longer
| actively enhanced.
|
| Cosmic Desktop (creators of pop-shell) is further innovating in
| this area as well.
| aquariusDue wrote:
| I too used to use pop-shell a few years ago while using PopOS
| but for the past 6 month or so I've felt great running Ubuntu
| 24.04 with the PaperWM Gnome extension.
|
| While Niri might be easier to install on Arch I would still
| suggest giving PaperWM a try for a week. I ended up missing it
| waaay too much after disabling it for a few days on a whim and
| now I can't imagine using a computer without a scrolling WM
| given the choice.
|
| Just uhh... Keep a keybindings cheatsheet nearby, like the one
| in the PaperWM GitHub repo.
| klardotsh wrote:
| I could have word for word written almost exactly this blog post,
| that's how dead-on-accurate I find it, and how similar OP and I's
| experiences are (down to when and why we originally switched to
| Sway - mixed DPI long before Wayland was really "stable" for a
| daily driver).
|
| Niri is incredible, and has completely eliminated the mildly
| infuriating bin-packing and layout-optimization problems that
| TWMs exhibit, without sending me back to the floating WM dark
| ages. I wish Niri had existed like 10 years ago, but I'll accept
| it existing now as plenty good enough.
| LawnGnome wrote:
| I could also say the same, including the Wayland origin story.
| I'm pretty new to Niri -- I only started playing with it about
| a month ago -- but it's just absolutely that little bit more
| than Sway I didn't know I needed.
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