There I was: happily using Hyprland and BAM! Brodie Robertson shared a video about Niri – a scrolling window manager. It looked weird but intriguing, so I installed it. My plan was to see what it was like and go back to Hyprland. But we all know that’s not what happened.
Background
I’ve been using tiling window managers for a long time now. Back in late late 2000s/early 2010s, I was introduced to dwm. I ran dwm on my OpenBSD laptop for several years while also playing around with awesomewm, spectrwm, and cwm. Then I used a Mac for a while. But when I switched to Linux, I started using Ubuntu and its default environment, Gnome. But there were some things I didn’t like about Ubuntu, so I switched to Fedora, still using Gnome. But after a while, I switched over to Fedora’s KDE Spin. Again, though, I wasn’t too happy with Fedora and I found out about Arch Linux. Also, I really missed the keyboard-driven goodness that is a tiler.
Qtile
When I installed Arch, I spent some time trying to find a window manager I liked (bspwm, xmonad, dwm again) and ultimately settled on Qtile. I spent a lot of time customizing Qtile and was very happy with it for years (just over 4 years). But the news recently about Xorg’s future scared me into checking out Wayland. I don’t have a specific article about Xorg in mind, but the news in general. I had tried to get Qtile working with Wayland in the past but my understanding was that Nvidia drivers were not supported under Wayland and Qtile just did not work for me, so I assumed it was Nvidia/Wayland.
But a friend told me he was using Wayland with his Nvidia card no problem so I tried one more time and after more research, saw that Wayland support for Qtile is experimental (and they had not implemented some security/locking protocols that I depended on to lock my screen).
Hyprland
So I was in search of a new Window Manager to run under Wayland. I tried Sway (having oddly never tried i3) and liked it. But then I saw the sexiness that is Hyprland. It has fancy animations and looks very modern when pairing it with a nicely configured Waybar. I spent a while getting Hyprland working exactly how I wanted (pretty much how I had Qtile working) and made the switch full-time. I actually really LOVE Hyprland. The IPC (command-line) interface is very powerful and makes the whole experience with Hyprland very flexible.
Niri
But then Brodie posted that video about Niri. As I said, I decided to try it out and really, REALLY liked it. But in my little bit of research, there were a few things that didn’t work the same as Hyprland that I thought were deal-breakers. So I went back.
But every time I created a new window in Hyprland, I wished it was scrolling. I spent some time trying to make Hyprland work like Niri with Hyprscrolling, but it wasn’t the same.
So I just switched. I abandoned my beautifully working Hyprland environment for something that just did not work the way I wanted – all for some sweet, sweet scrolling!
Scratchpads
It didn’t take me long to get Niri working for me. The biggest thing is that I utilized scratchpads for my frequently used applications. For instance, in Hyprland, I had the Signal Desktop application launch into a scratchpad that I could easily toggle with a keybinding. So, I’m in Librewolf on my second monitor, third workspace, I press Super+Shift+A and Signal pops up over Librewolf. Super+Shift+A hides it again. It was beautiful. I used that set up for Bitwarden Desktop, a Scratchpad Terminal, Yazi (a terminal-based file manager), my volume control (pavucontrol), my bluetooth manager (blueman), and a couple other apps.
But Niri does not have scratchpads. So I wrote a script that sets aside a workspace just for “Scratchpads”. Instead of showing/hiding a workspace, now I just send the Signal Desktop window to my “Scratchpad Workspace”. When I want it back, it changes to a floating window and shows on my active monitor. Basically the same as scratchpads.
This works because with Niri, I don’t actually use any workspaces anymore. I mean, I use the main one. And now a second one for “Scratchpads”, but I basically just let new windows scroll to the right as they come up and it’s awesome.
Configs
You can see my Niri configs along with other scripts and configuration files I use to make Niri be magic!
Conclusion
Have you tried Niri yet? Let me know