alt Hacker NewsThe Dank Case for Scrolling Window Managers
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Niri¹ is awesome. It took quite a bit of customization when I originally installed it, however, quite a few things have improved since then. I believe that niri's out-of-the-box experience is reasonably good with the latest version. With the addition noctalia², it really feels like a complete desktop and offers the essential functionality that I'd expect from gnome or kde.
I don't get the hype for scrolling WMs. It feels like the app switcher view on phones. Never thought I needed that on desktop, normally it just freaks me out with how much stuff is open.
If you like this, check out stacked tiling. It comes natively in COSMIC and I believe it can be configured in i3, Sway and Hyprland as well. It's basically tabs across windows, but thanks to tiling you have different regions of the screen with their own tab sets. I usually just split the screen vertically once, so I have a left and right region. Turns out so many workflows can be described as 'ingest information somewhere and apply it somewhere else', and this is just such a useful layout for this. Whenever I have something that requires sole attention, I just maximize that window.
My favorite part about Niri is that a bunch of people said that writing a Wayland compositor in Rust was too hard to do for years. Turns out they're wrong!
I love the WM innovation that is happening in Linux right now. I've used i3, awesome and pop quite a bit.
That said, I've gone full circle and just use a regular ol' floating style for now. This is because if the realisation that my workflow is to open a browser, a terminal, and then just use tabs within them.
I always want to know other people's workflows! I'm sure for some people who need/want lots of windiwd open, scrolling and tiling WMs provide massive utility.
I really like them, but I don't think I can honestly claim they help my oroductivityat all (I might still pretend this is true now and again though)
I've switched my work laptop from W10 to Fedora about 9 months ago, using KDE during this time. The past month switched to Niri + DMS and I'm extremely happy, which is odd to say. I've a stacked external monitor setup 2 x 4k monitors on top of each other. Top one is the main, runs mostly just the IDE. The bottom one with 7 named workspaces:
- chat: teams / discord - work: assisting workspace for Main screen - git : sourcegit - terminal: for general terminal stuff - claudecode - work related browsing - personal browsing
All workspaces are accessible their own hotkey, so I can work on something on the main, and instantly switch to a specific application. I had the exact setup with KDE, but I had to do some trickery to get this working with Virtual Desktops Only on Primary Display https://store.kde.org/p/2143363. Niri enables to have the same setup, + display independent workspace setup which I really wanted. The same feature was requested 20! years ago in KDE, and we still don't have it. This kinda shows the power of independent projects like Hyprland and Niri.
My only gripe is that these newer wm's require hardware acceleration. It's hard to try them out in a VM, and committing to a hardware install is a big ask for anyone that's been using something else for a while.
Currently using Niri and DMS via https://github.com/zirconium-dev/zirconium which is fedora bootc atomic + niri + dms. After taking a year or so away from tiling WMs where I was using KDE for a bit, I'm enjoying it quite a lot.
Super impressed by the "out of the box" experience given that it took a ton of sweat and tears to get these types of setups 10+ years ago when I posting stupid screenshots of my awesomewm and bspwm configs to /r/unixporn.
I wasn't so sure about the scrolling wm thing but I'm enjoying not having to worry about switching layouts constantly to "make room" like I always have in traditional tiling wms. Dynamic virtual desktops has taken some getting used to since I was a long-term adherent of the "10 static virtual desktops" way of thinking, but again it's been a good experience to just get used to the idea that each virtual desktop isn't as limited as it is in other WMs since you can have some content off screen.
I think an underrated aspect of Niri is that it's a cousin to System76's cosmic desktop: they share a base compositor through https://github.com/Smithay/smithay/. I think a big part of why Niri has been able to pull off such a polished experience has a lot to do with smart design from folks working on Smithay.
I have been using niri for almost an year now. First with waybar, now with Quickshell (which DankMaterialShell is baed upon).
There are many other implementations of this paradigm if niri doesn't feel/work right to you.
- PaperWM (for Gnome; the original)
- mangowc (dwm rewrite but has a scrolling mode)
- scroll (fork of sway)
- papersway (based on sway)
- hyperscrolling (hyprland plugin)
- karousel (for KDE)
- PaperWM.spoon (for macOS)
- komorebi (for Windows)
I really miss classic X11 virtual panning desktops where I can get more real estate just by scrolling offscreen. I have a cyberdeck with a 1080x480 screen, and the vertical resolution is just too low to be able to display most dialogue boxes; if I could just have panning in Wayland it would be fantastic, as the guts are an RPi 5 and X11 is slow as molasses on there due to lack of classic 2D acceleration primitives.
I wish the author had spent more time explaining what's better about SWM compared to TWM.
The only thing he said:
> It was the best of both worlds—easy to navigate, while remaining mousable.
Is not really convincing as Cosmic desktop for example is tiling while remaining mousable.
I have been vaguely aware of PaperWM and Niri but never saw the appeal productivity-wise.
If you want to picture the future, imagine a million AI agents implementing todo apps and someone "re-imagining" the Alt+Tab feature, forever.
Niri demo video actually looks kinda cool, could be nice to use on a laptop when there's no access to multiple external monitors, so that you could just pop a log/tool/whatever window to the side without fulling swapping workspaces xmonad/i3/hyprland/etc style.
But with 2+ screens available I'd think at least for me the usefulness would diminish, even if you'd have per monitor scrolling
This is all cool but what we really need is tabbed tiling. I miss the days using i3 where I had a fixed canvas of frames and then just tabs for each frame.
If you are a KDE user Karousel[1] a Kwin script is an easy way to try out a scrolling style.
Dank can't configure the taskbar to have a dark background while the system stays in light mode.
I installed NixOS on my desktop and used Sway for a while before switching to Niri.
With Sway, I'm constantly having to find a place to open a new window (tuck it into the current workspace or create Yet Another One). Or I'd slot it into some tabbed group and forget.
With Niri, I hate to admit it, but even after a month I would get lost. I would lose track of where things were not just between workspaces, but even on the same workspace: was that one claude terminal I'm looking for scrolled off to the right or left?
I ended up writing my own Fuzzel tools so that I could do the macOS thing where I alt-tab to apps and then alt-tilde between apps of the same kind.
But in the end I couldn't make it more productive than my macOS workflow with a global hotkey iTerm2 window with 10 tabs and then just alt-tabbing + alt-tilde between apps.
I'm currently using niri (was previously using Hyprland).
Having used dwm-like tiling window managers for most of the time, I don't really care for the scrolling or dynamic workspace aspects of niri at all - in fact, I kinda dislike them (or haven't gotten used to them, at least). To me, it kills the point of a keyboard-centric desktop environment - which is the speed and lack of friction in making the window you want appear in front of your eyes.
Despite that, I still really like it. Mostly because I have so much more faith in its development. The documentation is excellent. The configuration file is sane, and not as arcane and ad hoc as the hyprland.conf format. The source repository looks well-maintained. Being written in Rust rather than C++ means onboarding new developers is easier. The discourse is more measured, owing to the lack of a somewhat stubborn lead maintainer in the case of Hyprland.
The surrounding ecosystem seems to be flourishing as well, with projects like Noctalia Shell, DankMaterialShell, and niri-flake natively supporting niri.
And perhaps most importantly, the out-of-the box experience is really nice. You have proper monocle and tabbed layouts without any compromises - features Hyprland has still not developed, where they are only possible with scuffed C++ plugins, or where its BDFL has stated they will never be introduced. Most features one would expect from a WM are already there and well-documented, which can't be said about Hyprland.