alt Hacker NewsNiri 26.04: Scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor
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Niri introduced scroll-based window management to me and it instantly clicked. I'm very happy to see a full-on Niri per-workspace emulation mode in OmniWM[1] for the Mac, recently and thankfully made compatible with Sequoia. It immediately became my main window manager.
If you are on a Mac, check out OmniWM, which has a Niri layout, in addition to one that's more like Hyprland. It has made my work on MacOS much more pleasant.
https://github.com/BarutSRB/OmniWM
I posted about it a bit ago when I just started using it, and it's been really great. Highly recommended.
I’ve gotten so used to the tiling WM workflow of quick-switching between a bunch of different dedicated fullscreen workspaces and managing windows with pure keyboard. Each workspace typically has a single app, or terminal with tmux, but occasionally I’ll split two apps side by side.
Would love to hear the perspective of anyone who switched from a similar workflow to Niri. How does the mental model shift?
For people that went from i3wm to Niri, I would love to be convinced.
Being a i3wm(now sway) user, I tried Niri but found the following points a little bit uncanny:
- (Cropping) Sometimes when I scroll by shifting focus, a little bit like 10% of the window I pushed to the left keeps appearing. I tried to configure Niri in such a way that never a tiny fraction of a window be cropped but couldn't manage. Not sure I missed some config though.
- (Scratchpads) No scratchpads. There's workaround that I saw using extension scripts, but felt cumbersome to use(not the script itself, I just wished it was native feature on Niri). I use scratchpads a lot for "global" apps like email, discord, obsidian so I can open them on any workspace I am at, then make them disappear completely after.
- (Spatial Memory) By being used to i3wm I am comfortable pushing different applications so they can fit on a single screen. In i3wm i have "perfect vision" of a workspace. Niri style keeps me "forgetting" what's to the left and right. I know I can zoom out, but feels like friction upon my short term memory.
I would love to receive any suggestion so I overcome these points that I stumbled upon. Soon I might be trying Niri again on a more work environment(my first try was on a PC connected to TV, so more media focused usage).
Related:
The dank case for scrolling window managers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46820468 - Jan 2026 (61 comments)
Niri 25.11 released with alt-tab and other improvements - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46097051 - Nov 2025 (1 comment)
Niri – A scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45461500 - Oct 2025 (229 comments)
The Future Is Niri - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43342178 - March 2025 (216 comments)
Niri: A scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37367687 - Sept 2023 (37 comments)
I’ve been using the PaperWM extension for Gnome (that I believe Niri took inspiration from?), and it’s definitely an interesting way to work. I’m not sure that I love it, I feel like it’s a bit cumbersome when I have more than 3 windows in a single workspace.
But I’m giving it a real shot, and the nice thing about it being a Gnome extension is that the rest of the Gnome DE is right there without a ton of config.
I use mangowm on the wl-only branch(which is based on wlroots 0.20). It uses a lot less resources, has more layouts and I have fewer problems with it. Although niri seems to have more eye candy. It's definitely worth giving a try. If you want HDR, you have to wait though.
If anyone wants to try the NNN (Niri-Nix-Noctalia) dots. Feel free to use my flake, https://github.com/MostlyKIGuess/nix-flake-public.
Turns out a Russian prodigy can build something better than 100 million dollars worth of Claude tokens
Totally not mass psychosis guys pump the SPY
I switched to Niri at the end of last year after over a decade on i3.[1] Having horizontal scroll unbounded by my monitor size and workspace count unbound by the number of shortcut keys I have configured has been very freeing, and the graphical stuff is nice too.
My only remaining pain point is that its X compatibility layer, xwayland-satellite, does not yet support drag and drop between X and Wayland programs.[2]
[1]: https://davidyat.es/2026/01/28/niri/
[2]: https://github.com/Supreeeme/xwayland-satellite/issues/133
Niri is really good. Very customizable. I do not think in terms of monitors anymore, just workspaces that are virtually infinite.
I recently switched to niri after bouncing off it about a year ago, and this time it stuck.
One thing I learned in the process was that the custom wayland desktop world has the concept of a "desktop shell," which provides most or all of the additional components you might want on top of your compositor, rather than having to separately install a top bar, manage suspend/hibernate, figure out notifications, etc. You can of course still do all of that, but you can also just install niri and something like the "dank material shell"[0] and be off to the races. I first discovered this via awesome-niri[1].
The combination of niri and the shell means that the extent of my custom NixOS configuration for the two is entirely limited to keybindings and some custom window rules for zoom.
I'm on hyprland (which also has a scrolling layout). How do you guys navigate between your workspaces? I'm accomodated to super+<num>, which jumps to workspace #<num> with a mostly fixed purpose. If I opened something ad-hoc, I usually know where I placed it. I found it difficult to operate in a setting which more resembles the state of my desk (if it weren't random access).
I used Niri on a Framework laptop a few months ago, and it was Okay. I don’t think it clicked with me/I’m not sure if I was using it right, but it was giving me a headache to mentally deal with spatially mapping all of my windows (I came from MacOS where I just knew which windows I had open and cmd+tab into the right one when needed)..
I think I would’ve adjusted best if I could somehow just watch someone do their daily work on Niri, to learn how to use it right. Curious if people who like Niri came from tiling WMs or standard DEs.
Slightly off topic: Does anyone know a window manager where you can map virtual desktops to real monitors? E.g. When I'm on the move I cycle through my virtual desktops on my laptop screen, but when connecting a monitor I want to cycle between my virtual desktops independently on either screen. While both screens share the same set of virtual desktops.
I love niri. I'm half way through getting hdr rendering running
Another vote on niri being just great software. While itss idea (scrolling tiling windows manager) is novel, the software in itself is very polished with a very mature API that doesn't change at every version (looking at you hyprland).
Give me Niri on macOS pleaaaaaase. I tried the variants but it’s not there yet, I want native trackpad gesture integration, either no animations or buttery smooth ones with full control, blur please, and everything else.
A few releases back when niri got "proper" Alt-Tab behavior like one expects from more mainline WMs made it pretty much perfect for me. Could not dream of wanting anything more than what it already has.
I use hyprland. And I navigate with ALT+? commands for the main apps I use, and alt+tab strictly to go back to previous workspace. I also have a task bar that I can also click to navigate when I need (on waybar). I love it. I'm never in some intermediate state like a view of all my workspaces, or holding alt tab to choose some workspace - it's always a single hotkey stroke. I also have 3 special workspaces that use alt+scroll-up/scroll-down/middle-mouse-button-click, for my password manager, my dashboard, and my music (strawberry).
I encourage everyone using the ubuntu/windows paradigm to check this out instead. Windows users see me working and their jaws drop, because it's so fast and smooth.
If anyone's curious I use ALT+: e for file manager (thunar), w for chrome, a for whatsapp, x for terminal, c for claude web, y for youtube, n for a notepad-style program, d for launcher (fuzzel), t for sublime, z for emacs, v for clipboard history, f for full screen, q to kill active and f1 for a emacs capture-dialog. g sends a window to a ws on my main monitor, and alt+shift+g sends it to secondary monitor.
Slightly offtopic and it's odd because I'm asking for something that feels like should exist though, like, I get that I have no right to it.
This, for X, but not under Gnome or KDE? Even better, perhaps as just a script or something under Openbox?
(might be time to get into the vibecoding...)
Using Niri for over a year now.
Before that I was on sway for 6 years, before that on i3, before that on KDE, Gnome, ...
I'll never look back.
Niri is the best window manager I ever used, it just instantly clicked with me.
This sounds very interesting. I'm currently in the middle of revisiting my desktop setup and interaction style. Landed on Qtile/Wayland but now I'm starting to notice lag.
> Every monitor has its own separate window strip. Windows can never "overflow" onto an adjacent monitor
I'm someone who was very content with the constraint of a laptop (one single screen, generally running one maximized window per workspace and switching with F-keys), but has never really become comfortable with multi-monitors. Can anyone explain why window managers always default to treating individual monitors as completely separate entities rather than one larger screen that works together? Like I would have thought the default here would be to have two monitors operate on the same horizontally-scrolling set of windows. Either tied together, or as independent viewports. But everybody always seems to reach towards treating each monitor as having disjoint windows. Which I guess I can get used to, it just seems odd?
Niri is so good. I've switched to using it about 5 months ago and it was legit the best computing decision I can remember making in recent history to move away from Windows.
I have a huge amount of gratitude towards the author of niri.
My dotfiles have always included an install script for setting everything up around command line tools, theme switching and more but it fully supports niri now too on Arch based distros https://github.com/nickjj/dotfiles in case anyone is shopping around for a new desktop environment and wants to get going quickly. I run it on both my main desktop and a travel laptop.