Hey folks,
remember the post that was made a few months ago about an infinite canvas/scrollable WM? Here we have the stable release of a (onedirectional) scrollable one inspired by gnome’s PaperWM.
Aaaand… …it’s written in Rust!
Wow, awesome!
I HAVE to try this out!Wouldn’t vertical scrolling make more sense?
Pretty much everything we do already scrolls vertically primarily, its more “natural” at this point.
Isn’t it the opposite then? Since your windows will have vertical scrolls, it makes sense to tile them horizontally in order to maximize vertical space for each window, imo.
The app window you scroll up and down in would be the same regardless.
My thinking is we’re already used to going up and down to view other things, so copy that movement to the whole de.
Usually people like to maximize the height of windows, especially to have 2 windows side by side, so it just conceptually makes a lot of sense to have every window have the maximum height and just add windows horizontally so they are actually visible like in normal tiling window managers. Maximizing the width of windows doesn’t really make that much sense honestly, because most horizontal space is wasted because theres so much horizontal space compared to vertical space.
I think that vertical scrolling would make sense on vertical monitors.
So you scroll websites left to right on a horizontal monitor?
That’s something different. This compositor’s concept is that you have line of windows that you scroll through, as you can see on the screenshots. You always see part of the line, and the part you see usually contains multiple windows. If the line is vertical as you suggests, you wouldn’t usually be able to fit multiple windows on the monitor, because normal monitor is horizontal and apps are much better resizable horizontally. If you want to view two webpages at once on horizontal monitor, do you tile them vertically or horizontally?
Excuse the jank arse gif
https://i.imgur.com/j6OyRvl.gif
But this is what I mean. It can still show the same amount of screen space as scrolling horizontally so there’s no difference between the two options there, but it feels more natural to go up/down compared to left/right to access different content/windows.
I can see what you mean, and I get your argument, but personally I still feel that horizontal scrolling suits this kind of desktop navigation better.
That’s just an image gallery. Applications can feel much different. There’s a reason left-right tiling/snapping is much more popular than up-downs. You’d have to scroll down considerably more to grasp the content.
The only difference I can see is that you might have for example four windows 1, 2, 3, 4, all taking half of the screen. On a compositor like Niri, you can scroll so that you can see windows 1 and 2, or 2 and 3, or 3 and 4. On vertically scrolling one, you can see 1 and 2 or 3 and 4 if I understand it correctly. This is much more noticeable if you work with many smaller windows, just like on the screenshots from the article and repo’s readme. I usually use only one or two windows per virtual desktop, so what you suggest would be more practical for me. But I use only notebook, and I can imagine using Niri on some hi-res ultrawide monitor.
I want to have multiple windows side by side and switch between them quickly. The vertical scroll is to switch between desktops.
Is the desktop feature implemented? Something like multiple lanes you can switch back and forth.
I use PaperWM with vspace in gnome. No idea about this one
With how most monitors being wide-screen (or even ultra-wide), horizontal might make more sense
Well that could be annoying if you’re trying to scroll past an open application but you end up vertically scrolling within the application instead.
The exact same thing would happen if you tried to scroll horizontally though? It’s a 2d axis on a wheel, depending on where your focus is you’re going to go the same direction.
Man there is a night and day difference between the comments here and on phoronix, what is their problem?
Phoronixposting rots your brain
I love it!
I am still using PaperWM but I’d def rebase to it as soon as someone created an ublue image for it
I don’t want to miss scrollable wms
I wanted to write the same.
I have literally zero clue about WMs, but I think I will try it if nobody else wants to.
I’m just super hyped in trying it now!
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Looks nice. Is anyone able to tell if I’m going to screw up my KDE install if I try it out? I’ve never tried WM / compositors on KDE that weren’t targeting KDE before.
It should be fine I think. On Linux you can have multiple Desktop Environments installed (ex KDE Plasma & Gnome as well.)
I tried Hyprland a few months ago like this. I had Plasma installed then installed hyprland as well. During login with SDDM you can select which DE to launch.
Edit: On github it says you should install it alone to make sure. I dont know then, maybe it works? I am still new to Linux as well.
I installed GNOME and KDE side-by-side once on Fedora, and that messed a whole bunch of things up like configuration files, icons etc. YMMV
I recommend rather spinning up a VM to try it out first.
Might be convenient on Touchscreen-Notebboks/Tablets. Any AUR package planned?
It’s already in the AUR
Woah.
I was just thinking of trying this with gnome mobile shell on mine! It looks like a great way to handle windows on gnome with touch
The COPR package didn’t work for me on Nobara, so I had to build from source, but it works great. There are a couple of things I don’t like, but overall seems pretty neat.
If I can get Xwayland to work nicely for steam with high refresh rates, then it seems like this might be the WM for me until COSMIC-DE comes out.
I have had it installed for a while and I check it after every update. I can’t use it yet as my daily driver because of scaling issues. The desktop scales properly but windows do not. Fonts are too small and the cursor is tiny. I figured out how to scale the cursor manually but I couldnt scale the windows.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The newest Wayland compositor on the scene with its first stable release is Niri, a scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor inspired by the PaperWM GNOME Shell extesnsion.
The Niris v0.1 Wayland compositor positions all windows into an infinite horizontal strip that scrolls left and right.
Niri v0.1 supports multiple monitors, mixed GPU systems, HiDPI displays, dynamic workspaces, screencasting support via the GNOME XDG Desktop portal, live-reloading configuration system, a configurable layout, and other features that are off to a good start for this compositor.
Here are some screenshots of Niri v0.1 in action provided by this open-source project:
Niri v0.1 is available in source form as well as packages via community repositories for Fedora COPR, NixOS Flake, Arch Linux AUR package, and also a FreeBSD port.
Downloads and more details on the Niri v0.1 release via GitHub.
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this bot really needs a threshold of what’s an acceptable tldr
Wow, very useful indeed /s
