niri

A scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor.

Status

A lot of the essential functionality is implemented, plus some goodies on top. Feel free to give niri a try. Have your waybars and fuzzels ready: niri is not a complete desktop environment.

Idea

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 a full monitor worth of height, divided among its windows.

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

This is one of the reasons that prompted me to try writing my own compositor. PaperWM is a solid implementation, 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.

Building

For Fedora users, there's a COPR with built and packaged niri: https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/yalter/niri/

First, install the dependencies for your distribution.

• Ubuntu:

  sudo apt-get install -y software-properties-common
  sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:pipewire-debian/pipewire-upstream
  sudo apt-get update -y
  sudo apt-get install -y libudev-dev libgbm-dev libxkbcommon-dev libegl1-mesa-dev libwayland-dev libinput-dev libdbus-1-dev libsystemd-dev libseat-dev libpipewire-0.3-dev

• Fedora:

  sudo dnf install gcc libudev-devel libgbm-devel libxkbcommon-devel wayland-devel libinput-devel dbus-devel systemd-devel libseat-devel pipewire-devel clang

Next, build niri with cargo build --release.

Installation

The recommended way to install and run niri is as a standalone desktop session. To do that, put files into the correct directories according to this table.

Doing this will make niri appear in GDM and, presumably, other display managers.

Running

cargo run --release

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

To exit when running on a TTY, press SuperShiftE.

Session

If you followed the recommended installation steps above, niri should appear in your display manager. Starting it from there will run niri as a desktop session.

The niri session will autostart apps through the systemd xdg-autostart target. You can also autostart systemd services like mako by symlinking them into $HOME/.config/systemd/user/niri.service.wants/. A step-by-step process for this is explained on the wiki.

Niri also works with some parts of xdg-desktop-portal-gnome. In particular, it supports file choosers and monitor screencasting (e.g. to OBS).

Default 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.

Configuration

Niri will load configuration from $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/.config/niri/config.kdl or ~/.config/niri/config.kdl. If this fails, it will load the default configuration file. Please use the default configuration file as the starting point for your custom configuration.

Niri will live-reload many of the configuration settings, like key binds or gaps, as you change the config file. Though, some settings are still missing live-reload support. Notably, output modes and positions will only apply when the output is reconnected.