niri

The beginnings of a scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor.

Status

Heavily work in progress. The occasional thing works, but likely is in a half-broken state.

Idea

This section describes the goals I'm working towards. Many things don't work as written yet.

Niri implements scrollable tiling, heavily inspired by PaperWM. Windows are arranged in columns on an infinite strip going to the right. Every column takes up as much height as possible, spread between its windows.

With multiple monitors, every monitor has its own separate window strip. Windows can never "overflow" to an adjacent monitor.

This is one of the reasons that prompted me to try writing my own compositor. PaperWM is a solid implementation that I use every day, but, being a GNOME Shell extension, it has to work around Shell's global window coordinate space to prevent windows from overflowing.

Niri also has dynamic workspaces which work similar to GNOME Shell. Since windows go left-to-right horizontally, workspaces are arranged vertically. Every monitor has an independent set of workspaces, and there's always one empty workspace present all the way down.

Niri tries to preserve the workspace arrangement as much as possible upon disconnecting and connecting monitors. When a monitor disconnects, its workspaces will move to another monitor, but upon reconnection they will move back to the original monitor where it makes sense.

Running

cargo run -- -- alacritty

Inside a desktop session, it will run in a window. On a TTY, it will run natively.

To exit when running on a TTY, press SuperShiftE.

Hotkeys

When running on a TTY, the Mod key is Super. When running in a window, the Mod key is Alt.

The general system is: if a hotkey switches somewhere, then adding Ctrl will move the focused window or column there.

Hotkey	Description
ModT	Spawn alacritty
ModQ	Close the focused window
ModH or Mod←	Focus the window to the left
ModL or Mod→	Focus the window to the right
ModJ or Mod↓	Focus the window below in a column
ModK or Mod↑	Focus the window above in a column
ModCtrlH or ModCtrl←	Move the focused column to the left
ModCtrlL or ModCtrl→	Move the focused column to the right
ModCtrlJ or ModCtrl↓	Move the focused window below in a column
ModCtrlK or ModCtrl↑	Move the focused window above in a column
ModU	Switch to the workspace below
ModI	Switch to the workspace above
ModCtrlU	Move the focused window to the workspace below
ModCtrlI	Move the focused window to the workspace above
Mod,	Consume the window to the right into the focused column
Mod.	Expel the focused window into its own column
ModShiftE	Exit niri