The dank case for scrolling window managers | Hacker News Reader

The dank case for scrolling window managers

tedium.co

109 pointstodsacerdoti61 comments

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.

That's what struck me about niri when I tried it - it does what it promises without any show stopping bugs or complications.

Agreed. Recent Niri switcher here (from Sway after a brief swing by Cosmic) and I find it surprisingly simple and reliable for its age.

1000% agree - you said everything better that I was trying to say in my comment. Likewise coming from conventional TWMs I had some of the same struggles initially but the whole thing is just so smooth and config is so stupidly easy to work with. The docs are amazing and the community seems pretty boring in a good way :)

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.

1. https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri

2. https://docs.noctalia.dev/getting-started/installation/

Wow, I just tried noctalia and it instantly replaced a load of brittle and stupid hacks I was relying on, what an amazing out of the box experience

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 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.

If you are looking for some reasoning behind the "hype": one piece of it is that humans have relatively good contextual spatial memory and using one very large "space" that has a sort of "physicality" to it (you can scroll it; things generally stay where you put them; etc) can feel really good. It goes back to some of the early ideals of "spatial navigation" of the original "desktop metaphor". (Many of which have been somewhat lost to time, with a lot less emphasis on things like windows opening in the same appearance as when they were last closed.)

I think where scrolling WMs starts to feel like it scratches peculiar itches the most is when you have a complex multi-workspace config in a more traditional tiling WM. Each workspace is a different place. In some of the best cases the WM may give a metaphor that each workspace is on a cube or other polygon that you are switching faces on. Scrolling WMs simplify needing to do 3D compositing if you want to visualize that "space" at a distance or have nice flips between workspaces that provide spatial cues to your brain, because scrolling is a thing we do a lot. We have many apps with "infinite scrolling" today; applying that to one large workspace can feel like a nice space to have to arrange your windows in, and other common computer gestures like zoom out and then back in to a different part of it feel "natural". Navigating your "desktop" becomes just like navigating a large Excel file or a large code file.

I guess it's the 'large' part that turns me off. If it's actually far away so that you need to scroll a lot to get there, it just feels like it's more work to me. Sort of replicating one of the less appealing features of a physical desk, the mess that it quickly becomes if you manipulate a lot of documents. I don't even use workspaces that much for the same reason, and having tabs takes away a lot of the need I feel. You even retain some sense of physical distance because of the tab positions.

To stay with the physical analogy, the layout I've described is like always keeping all your documents in two neat stacks before you. Except that it's much easier and quicker to flip pages to the top than it would be with physical documents, so you're rarely tempted to start spreading them out.

I feel like my biggest gripe with every single WM I've tried is the Idea that if I reboot, I lose everything. Sure I can add complex rules in sway like "always open Firefox on workspace 2, slack on workspace 1", but i still have to launch them on boot (unless I automate this as well), and it becomes complex when I say I always want 3 terminals on workspace 3, etc.

I wish I could fine tune once, and snapshot whatever it is I'm using, and have it appear automatically when I reboot.

Yeah, I remember at one point I had some rather complex auto-workspace layouts in my xmonad config. I don't remember if I tried to automate the launching of apps as well, that most customized config was several computers ago.

Relatedly I know that Windows PowerToys has a tool called "Workspaces" that also automates the launching as well as the placement, but it doesn't seem to integrate enough with FancyZones for me to find it that useful. Which is weird because they are "neighbors" in PowerToys. Still it's a good idea and interesting to see an experiment in that direction.

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)

Also for macOS, there's paneru: https://github.com/karinushka/paneru

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 haven't checked the repo but just carefully use unsafe as an escape hatch when needed and Rust gets out of your way. Sure you give away some of the guarantees that some people get cultish about but you get to tap into a beautiful ecosystem and reap the benefits.

There are more. Jay, cosmic and even xfce is writing their new compositor in Rust.

Also Pinnacle

https://github.com/pinnacle-comp/pinnacle

The majority of the projects in this comment chain don't actually independently implement a compositor in Rust - which is a good thing IMHO. Cosmic and Pinaccle at least come from a common core written in rust that is associated with the cosmic project: https://github.com/Smithay/smithay/

niri also uses smithay. jay is its own thing.

I wish Smithay was actually in Rust and not a wrapper for the C libraries, though.

Playing with client-side Wayland programming, wayrs is a lot nicer to deal with than the C library wrappers.

https://github.com/MaxVerevkin/wayrs

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.

Yes I had recently tried to fake a scrolling tiling WM this way and surprised it's not available afaics on distros or MacOS?

With that said, I love DankMaterialShell along with Niri, it's basically exactly what I had been wanting after using PaperWM for a while.

isn't just about anything slow as molasses without 2d acceleration primitives?

I remember to this day the difference between my Hercules dynamite pro without and then with acceleration support. now I feel old.

FVWM, TWM and others had a grid-like move/resize option where instead of redrawing the whole window you would just move a wireframe around until you placed the window 'down'.

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.

You can often install packages in a live system ("try" option of installation medium). The backing storage for that is a RAM disk overlay. Did you not know or is that too short-lived for you for a proper trial?

then you'll have to stop using your existing system. and yes, it's too short-lived, I'd want like a week of usage normally. I can see the videos and screenshot to know what it looks like, I want to see how buggy it is, and how hard it is to manage things with it.

You don't have to remove other WMs to try a new one. Most login managers will let you choose at login.

good point, but I still do a lot of work in VMs, that's where most of my workload is. But for my other laptop without VMs I could try that, thanks.

Just install sway and run it from a different tty

Many wayland compositora can run as clients of another compositor.

So you can run a niri session inside of a gnome sesson for example. No need for a VM.

It's not really a commitment though. I have like six WMs installed I can switch between.

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.

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 use a hybrid setup. I have 9 tiled desktops, and 1 floating, across 2 monitors, so I "make a mess" on the floating one and the rest are task focused, typically with one dedicated to a single browser window for my "main" browsing.

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.

I can just give you my view. I've been a TWM user for >10 years than switched to niri via some of the sway/hype land scrolling plugins.

My problem with TWMs was always that depending on monitor size you can open 3-4 windows in a set layout (be it the tradional spirals, or H splits...) before you have to do "manual" window management (i.e. move windows into tabbed layouts, move them to new workspaces,...). So for me that generated a friction, where sometimes I just wanted e.g. to quickly open a terminal do some things but keep the rest the same, but not knowing if the terminal becomes permanent. I other words in TWMs I found myself having to know what exactly I want the window for all the time.

SWMs get rid of that friction, I just open a new window and it gets pushed to the right, while keeping windows at the perfect size and if not I can easily switch between the 3 sizes I want (never found I needed more than fullscreen half screen, third of the screen). So I simply don't have to think what I want the e.g. terminal for (something long term or just quick try) before I use it. While it sometimes makes finding the right window a little more messy (the overview really helps though), I find I end up more organised, because I keep related windows in the same workspace, while on TWMs I ended up with 3 or 4 workspaces just for temporary terminals (which made finding the right one often very messy as well).

I had an excellent experience using niri to manage visuals for a university event recently. I was handling background loops, videos, and slides, and since it was a last-minute setup I had to improvise the entire workflow. The scrollable layout was perfect for this, I organized the windows horizontally in the exact sequence they needed to appear, which effectively turned a mix of an image viewer, video player, browser, and PDF readers into a seamless presentation (I could just have used the browser but it would have felt clumsy in comparison). The ability to keep everything in fullscreen and instantly exchange windows between displays via keyboard shortcuts made the transitions almost invisible to the audience.

Just chiming in to the general discussion on WMs, but I've never found anything else like Awesomewm. It doesn't have a config file exactly, it has a file that instantiates the various parts of the WM, and you can add or change the code as needed at that point. It's maybe more like how you can include whatever python you like in a Django settings.py

As far as I know, no other WM is like this. I'm loving the unparalleled flexibility and freedom, although I would like to try out some Wayland options at some point.

If you are a KDE user Karousel[1] a Kwin script is an easy way to try out a scrolling style.

1. https://github.com/peterfajdiga/karousel

Been using it for like two years now. It's great. No need for anything else.

First time I saw the word Dank in the Big 26

Disagreeably moist or humid. I guess it’s not really any different than saying something is ‘the shit.’

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

I'm using niri with two screens at work and it's been very nice. I don't open windows on the side as you suggest but I believe that can be done with custom bindings and/or window rules.

It is true, I moved to single monitor since using niri.

> Eventually more people figured out that this was the ticket,

Sorry to interrupt you, but:

1. X Windows has the notion of virtual screen which was bigger than the real one allowing you to have a virtual bigger screen.

2. Fvwm has virtual desktops which can be either fixed or you can scroll between them.

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've had a pretty good experience setting up a launcher of some kind that can fuzzy find from my open programs/windows. super+space "fi" to pull up my open Firefox. On MacOS I have super+tab bring up Alfred with a fuzzy find through my open tabs. I need to get around to figuring out something similar for my Linux DE.

I just start closing stuff when this happens. If I can't remember why a window is open, it probably won't hurt to close it.

Right Cmd app and mapping caps to right command, deterministic window switching is key.

I used caps jkl; chording to give me left/right: quarter, half, 2/3rds, full and the k and l alone to give me different middle of window widths. caps I switches screens and caps U to rotate heights.

> was that one claude terminal I'm looking for scrolled off to the right or left?

Isn't that what the overview feature is for?

Video: https://github-production-user-asset-6210df.s3.amazonaws.com...

Kind of. In practice it's like that equivalent macOS view that shows all your windows: you don't want to use it that often.

Also, it zooms out too far to distinguish text. And if you configure it to not zoom out so far, it also loses its overview power.

- i cant help but notice this website is called tedium. is that some kinda pun on medium.com? is this website older than medium or what? i have never heard of this blog before?

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.

sway is an i3 config compatible replacement and supports tabs.

If you want to picture the future, imagine a million AI agents implementing todo apps and someone "re-imagining" the Alt+Tab feature, forever.

Dank can't configure the taskbar to have a dark background while the system stays in light mode.

Ever since I discovered EXWM (Emacs) years ago, I've never looked back. It's the most efficient free tiling model I've encountered so far, with windows easily resizable via mouse and/or keyboard, flipping between the current application/buffer and the last one used (`mode-line-other-buffer`), the "minimization" (`bury-buffer`) that remains listed among open applications/buffers etc.

I think the current problem with most desktop environments is the inability of those who develop them to imagine a different desktop. Let's just take how I arrived at EXWM. I was orphaned from OpenSolaris, moved to Ubuntu because coming from FreeBSD first and OpenSolaris (SXDE, CE and then OpenIndiana), GNU/Linux wasn't much by comparison, more development, better hw support, but a fragile and archaic system in too many aspects, archaic even in the mindset of many top developers, I think of Andrew Morton's infamous "rampant layer violation" talking about zfs. To the ridiculous development of BTRFS as a response and Stratis instead of perhaps looking at DragonFly BSD's Hammer as a possible response, after having had and thrown away filesystems like Nilfs2 or never really developed for user use filesystems like F2FS. Today, the love for containers useful only for commercial purposes rather than for declarative distros like NixOS or Guix System. Well, to make a long story short, at the time I chose Ubuntu with the Unity desktop, simply because I had other things to do than play around managing my desktop like in university days and Unity was fine, it was discreet, a thin bar at the top, a disappearing launcher on the side, a dash "search&narrow" style, the HUD wasn't bad for menus etc. Gnome SHell practically copied it while brilliantly managing to LOSE the only truly useful aspect of Unity: being there to serve the user discreetly. Where Unity was discreet, Gnome SHell is a secondary narcissist, trying to put itself at the center and minimizing the importance of the single window. KDE went off on a tangent from KDE4 onwards, becoming substantial bloatware. Simply put, there is no longer a desktop for the modern era because there is no understanding of what a desktop should be.

This must be a single application, fully moldable by the user, completely integrated. Emacs is that, the old Xerox workstations were that, the LispMs were that. We don't need containers that continue to sell packaged ignorance, resource waste, vulnerabilities. We don't need invasive and narcissistic GUIs. We need integration because we have a single mind with which we have fun, work, spend time, the same mind. So our computer exobrain must be one and not made in compartments or produced in competition with other products.

I want to link in my notes relevant emails, relevant RSS-fetched posts, relevant files, all without particular friction, because they have in common being information, generally textual. I want it to be copy-pasteable as needed. I want to be able to compose my UI in text with this becoming an active element where I want it. This is a desktop.

Not rigidity, limited and limiting narcissistic minimalism, not features visible to those who don't want them or absent for those who seek them. The desktop must be a PIM, a personal ERP, free and flexible like Emacs or simply be a relic of the past that won't be transformed from a relic into something modern by adding some graphical sugar. So my system must be declarative, not manually managed "containers" with holes punched everywhere to makes them usable.

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