LWN: Comments on "A tour of the niri scrolling-tiling Wayland compositor"

Panning Virtual Desktop

joey — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 15:35:05 +0000

While there are technical differences in implementation, the main difference is that the panning is under the control of the window manager, which allows it to build useful UI on top of it. The classic X panning was the X server just moving the viewport based on cursor movement. If it was possible for a window manager to control that, short of warping the cursor around, I never saw it.

Niri with LXQt

standreas — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 21:03:00 +0000

Just to mention that niri is one of the compositors supported out of the box by LXQt, which is an easy way to try it out as panel(s), desktop, notifications, powermanagement ecc are all in place from start and can be configured via GUI.

What is missing is the support for ext-workspace protocol (pager) which is under work. And yes, it's awesome :)

wmii

andreashappe — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 06:55:44 +0000

for some reason wmi (the predecessor for wmii) did it for me.. never got used to other tiling window managers since then.

papersway

spwhitton — Wed, 09 Jul 2025 10:11:01 +0000

Scrollable tiling is a wonderful recent trend.

Sway has become very mature and stable, and I wanted to stick with it for those reasons, but kept finding myself dissatisfied with the i3-style tiling it inherits, and wanted to try something else. So I implemented scrollable tiling on top of Sway using its IPC protocol. It works surprisingly well -- very well, in fact, and I've been using it daily for almost a year and a half.

Singing YaLTeR's praises

Minion3665 — Tue, 08 Jul 2025 09:46:43 +0000

YaLTeR (Ivan Molodetskikh, creator of Niri) is super friendly and helpful - and that makes me love the project even more!

Niri is already great to use - but YaLTeR's receptiveness to feedback and suggestions is wonderful.

He's also found better solutions to the things I/friends have suggested more than once than what we were thinking
- my friend suggested the overview while on call with me, we had thought of some ways it could work and what Niri ended up with is much better than our thoughts
- I suggested something which became max-scroll-amount, YaLTeR pulled several discussions together and came up with a solution that was both simple and general

So, yeah, Niri is a pleasure to use and has someone awesome maintaining the project

wmii

grawity — Tue, 08 Jul 2025 09:46:19 +0000

The column-based layout reminds me a lot of Wmii, the only tiling WM that I enjoyed using – could never get accustomed to i3/sway. (Wmii in turn I think was inspired by Plan9's Acme text editor/IDE of sorts.) I might give this a try.

Resource usage and start time

pmenzel — Tue, 08 Jul 2025 04:34:47 +0000

Thank you for the informative article. I’d be interested in the resource usage, like memory footprint, and the time it takes to start, after selecting it in GDM and logging in.

Panning Virtual Desktop

wahern — Tue, 08 Jul 2025 02:07:42 +0000

I remember in the 90s that you could configure XFree86 to provide a virtual root window larger than the screen, with smooth panning on my Packard Bell 486SX with bottom tier Cirrus VGA. IIRC, I would frequently arrive at this setup accidentally, by misconfiguring the X server--back when you had to manually configure your card and monitor settings. Are these tiling WMs that pan across a large virtual screen reviving this classic X capability?

Inspiration

calvin — Mon, 07 Jul 2025 19:02:07 +0000

A lot of these scrollable WMs take inspiration from Desktop Neo <https://desktopneo.com> and 10/GUI <https://web.archive.org/web/20130120191904/http://10gui.com/>.

You do not have to use Waybar

jzb — Mon, 07 Jul 2025 17:49:17 +0000

Sorry if I implied that Waybar is mandatory -- as you point out, it's not. I'd be curious to see your configs for COSMIC and Xfce. Might be fun to whip up a retro niri configuration with Xfce with CDE-style theming...

You do not have to use Waybar

jmalcolm — Mon, 07 Jul 2025 17:47:11 +0000

I have been using and loving Niri. The overview feature is simply incredible. You do not have to use it with Waybar though.

One one of my machines, I use Niri with COSMIC panel and COSMIC terminal for example.

On another machine, use the XFCE panel and application suite, including using the XFCE application launcher instead of fuzzel. Again, it all works well (other than having to minimize the Xwayland video bridge on start-up).

It is quite fast on older hardware.