alt Hacker NewsI 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.
on MacOS I used to use Yabai but moved away from it to using a hammerspoon setup to manipulate window positions. This was mostly because bsp just doesn't scale well with larger displays, in my opinion.
For me, the spatial mapping of windows comes naturally, though. For MacOS, I have 9 spaces. This can be as many or as little as you want, but for me, I have keybindings to switch between them, starting with ctrl + shift and then I map it to:
So in this array, top left is 'u', bottom right is '.' Then you are arbitrarily assigning that area for a certain kind of task or work. so maybe for communications (Teams, Discord, iMessage, etc.) may be designated as being in the 'j' space, or west. My primary work space where I web browsing or coding might be the 'k' area. My email could be 'u' and calendar 'i'. If you've ever worked with two windows side by side, then you already reasoning about it spatially. On the left is my terminal. On the right is my web browser. This just extends that concept slightly. I use 9 spaces in a square shape because it just translates to an extra large desktop.With that being said, things I'm frequently using (browser, terminal, mail, music, discord, etc) have their own global keys set to launch or switch to them and that is actually what I use most. I think if you can think about how you'd like to organize your system, just practicing that will help you reason about it that way.
I've been trying Niri on my thinkpad and I really like it, though I think I agree that it can be trickier to spatially map where things are in it. Its spaces are vertical and then you are scrolling the horizontal plane. They aren't always the same dimensions because it depends on how many windows are open. Getting back to say, the top right space, requires more work, at least out of the box. But on a smallish laptop screen I think it is well thought out way to make it easier to swap between different views.