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niri with waybar, rofi and foot (lemmy.ml)
submitted 5 months ago by to c/unixporn@lemmy.ml
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  1. Compositor/WM: niri
  2. Bar: waybar
  3. Terminal/Shell: foot / fish
  4. App Launcher: rofi
  5. File Manager: thunar
  6. Browser: helium
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[–] 2 points 5 months ago (1 child)

Someone else just suggested river to me recently. I’ll have to check it out. I also thought I’d hate Niri on vertical monitors, but I’ve gotten used to it. I assume there’s a way I could make it default to splitting the column horizontally once before expanding sideways when opening a new window, but that’s really the only big slow down for me.

Niri had been on my radar and then I somewhat abruptly wanted to ditch Hyprland and also took the opportunity to distro hop from Arch to NixOS. While I don’t think I miss Hyprland there are just a couple small things I’d love to get functioning with Niri. The things I like about Niri outweigh those by a lot though.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    River scratches the itch for me of hyper minimal. The config file is just a script/executable, it can be written in any language, but by default it's bash. in 0.4 (which should be coming out soon) they are coming out with a custom protocol to separate the window manager, and the compositor--so river will just handle the lower level/compositor things, and it can be a lot more simple to write a custom window manager. For example, KWM's first commit was Dec 25 2025 if I remember correctly; and the river wiki already lists 13 wm's that work with river as the compositor. I saw yalter say that things like animations etc will be more complicated with this model; but for me personally, i pretty much always shut off animations. also rivers community seems pretty good, and their code of conduct is solid.

    I saw one of your previous comments about how you appreciate the unix philosophy of “do one thing best”, i found niri kinda rubbed me weird when things like screenshot, overview, recent apps were built in--while very useful for a "just works" desktop, and it makes niri a compositor that i would recommend to my friends, it makes niri feel like a bit of a wrong fit for me; have you felt this at all?

    I also find with scrolling, I sometimes lose track of my windows, I wrote a script to display how many columns are in the current workspace, and which column is currently active--this helped a bit... but after 3-4 months of using niri i'm not 100% sold.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    Yeah, I do feel you about Niri being “bigger” than other options and thus leaves the whole Unix philosophy a bit. Though I can’t say I’m mad about it coming with screenshots built in because I struggled getting screenshots working for my entire stay on Arch. I didn’t try super hard, just had other fish to fry, but it was a nice out of box experience and functions a lot like the screenshot utility I used while on windows and feels a lot like the screenshot system on OSX from when I was there on school laptops in my teens.

    I can also totally understand the getting lost part. Though over time that issue has gone away for me because I keep specific windows in specific workspaces and those workspaces in specific spots relative to each other. Though this is why River sounds interesting. Being able to set a tag for a workspace and then assign windows to it seems like a very natural way to match the organization of my windows in my mind.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    Though I can’t say I’m mad about it coming with screenshots built in because I struggled getting screenshots working for my entire stay on Arch. I didn’t try super hard, just had other fish to fry

    exactly, i think this is why right now if a someone were to ask me for a starting point to get into a WM environment--I'd say niri with noctalia. But for me, there is some joy in just writing my scripts with grim and slurp and being able to do wacky things like automatically create a magic link on my local server, and my own domain to the screen shot that is accessible to the outside net.

    yea, one thing that just feels so good for me is being able to view multiple tags at once. So you can temporarily view tag X and Y together (so filling in a password, copying a command, or reading documentation), but then you don't have to reorganize you applications back into their "designated" work spaces/tags. Your "chat" and "terminal" can remain in their workspaces, but you can view them together briefly without having to move them back and forth. For me as someone who usually tries to abide to each activity has it's own workspace/tag, this work really well.

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  • [–] 0 points 5 months ago

    Ohhhhhhh. That scratched something in my brain. The viewing multiple tags. That’s on the fly special workspaces. Or maybe dynamic would be the better word. Like any tag can become that floating workspace. Presumably you could script context awareness into that too…Okay okay. I will be giving River a try. I’m in the throes of refactoring my nix config, but once I’ve got something stable again I’ll make sure to break it by installing River!

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    i agree with you a lot. but the compositor/wm space is wayland is still too thin, there aren't a lot of options

    1. sway - static so ruled out
    2. hyperland - too bloated so ruled out
    3. river - nice but take time and thought to configure and i havent had the time
    4. mango - i havent had the time to look at it

    i have been on niri for quitesometime now and have gotten used to its quirks, but there is surely room for me to explore river, mango, etc

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago

    i did try mango when it was maomaowm--it was pretty cool but at the time it was quite unstable; i think now, it just seems a bit bloated (again, this is a me thing) and like it's trying to do every single paradigm.

    ultimately i'm hoping river will be something that becomes a solid compositor base that supports most of the wlroots features. but then i can use a super minimal wm that is like a more modern dwm.

    but the compositor/wm space is wayland is still too thin, there aren’t a lot of options

    Hopefully this will change with river! For example here is a wm that is written with 600 lines of janet

    don't get me wrong though, niri has been so solid and is such a good compositor--maybe i slighted it a bit too much in my previous comment. Niri was a breath of fresh air compared to hyprland not having to worry about the config file/syntax changing every other release. But some of the trade offs that yalter makes aren't "for me" which is totally fine... certain things feel restrictive (no scratch pads, forced "dynamic" workspaces, no real vertical monitor support), but then some other things feel a bit bloated (overview, recent view, built in screenshot, etc). Overall though Niri has been my favorite. I think it's a pretty exciting time with four very solid options + countless wm on top of river soon.

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