Well, keep in mind that based on the author's "street cred", they are only 20. I think many of us would agree that when we were 20 our tolerance for all sorts of tinkering and BS in software was almost infinite compared to what it became after several years in the workforce or having a family.
I only bring this up because I have seen a dozen or more tiling WMs come and go over the past 20 years, many of which were touted as being "the future." The reality is that the most productivity-enhancing features from tiling WMs were integrated into all the major window managers ages ago, and pure tiling WMs will forever be a niche product.
That means to use them effectively you're going to need to invest a lot of time and effort for realistically incremental gains in productivity, and in return you get the side effect of niche products like these having a lots of rough edges.
I feel like all of the cool things about tiling window managers were actually all of the things other than the tiling. They have style, they're lightning fast, they're stable, they're customizable. They have practically a non-existent footprint in terms of resource consumption.
It's their superpower, and also they tile if you're into that. I never fell into a particularly useful workflow with tiling window managers myself, but as an invitation into the world of alternative lightweight Linux window managers, it's one of the most powerful demonstrations of the things Linux can do great.
I was likewise. And I found that my workflow was very compatible with tiling window managers. I used splits for temporary apps (like a 30 sec diversion into a terminal) but otherwise dedicated an entire workspace/screen to each app. It's a marginal improvement over Gnome, things are more likely to be in the right place out-of-the-gate (and, honestly, how often do you actually need to z-stack windows?).
I initially thought that an even better WM would be in the realm of an real-time strategy game camera: an infinite 2D canvas with "keybindable" locations+zooms. Niri has convinced me that my idea was too complicated, and it hits the perfect spot between functionality and usability.
It's like technology gifted to us by aliens from the future.
I think that's how most people work. I watched a colleague use his MacBook for react dev and all of his windows were just...like whatever size and position they opened at, but never full screen? My 3 monitor brain couldn't compute lol.
I have a laptop, 24" centered horizontal centered and a 24" vertical monitor and do a vertical half split for Spotify/teams/shell/outlook, with docs on the laptop screen and ide on the main window full screen. And virtual desktops for design/research, dev and personal.
Sticking with the standard monitor sizes instead of 4k or ultrawide makes screen sharing way simpler as well!
Small gripe, Modern UI design with 10px of padding around everything means most apps and pages HAVE to be full screen to get anything done.
This is me exactly haha. What I really want is just gnome with a little more tiling capability for the rare occasion, like thirds and quarters. But the majority of my tiling needs are in the terminal and tmux is the hero
PaperWM is almost exactly what Niri is in a Gnome extension form. It might actually also be the first to implement that kind of workflow.
https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM
They follow ubuntu releases, kind of. The downside, they went all in into their new desktop env - cosmic, and until they release it they won't move on from 20.04..
I really loved the tiling feature in PopOS 20.04 which came out of the box. But then I bought a new laptop, and had to move to arch to use it..
Tiling Assistant might be worth a try. It can be configured to be pretty out of the way and just add more snapping sizes, different per-monitor if you need.
I only use tiling when I'm coding, so I have a shortcut to a script that tiles all the open windows and gives the main window around 60% of the screen width.
I am an i3 convert, but I feel this is very useful, if you don't want a full-blown tiling extension, but want some of the convenience of tiling, this is such a simple solution!
Perhaps the biggest usage difference I'll make switching between a floating and tiling window manager is how I swap windows in those positions. In the tiling case I'll create tabbed containers and position the container tiles accordingly. Then any time I want to switch it's selecting a tab in the container. In the floating use case I just switch and position individually. Most of the time the tabbed container is the easier workflow, rarely the floating one can be a better fit - just depends on what exactly I'm doing at the time.
Overall the difference is relatively tiny and what I really end up wanting to get close to regardless of the tools I'm using is something like that Windows 10 beta period where you could put different applications as tabs in the same window, have the workspace/zone based tiling gestures + shortcuts, but have new things just default to floating windows until I assign them.
In the end... so long as I can position the window somewhere within 2 seconds it really doesn't matter much.
I used to do that when I had a two-monitor setup - one full-screen window per monitor. Now that I have one 4K monitor I usually have two windows side by side, and very occasionally quartered (sometimes of course also one window on one side and two on the other). Not sure if this "workflow" would lend itself to a tiling window manager (never tried one), because some of the windows are also stacked?
I'll occasionally do quarters. Especially half on one side, two quarter-windows on the other, for a 3-window arrangement. On Mac.
My key bindings are a little different because I use the defaults in Spectacle to do it. More than a decade like that. Program's discontinued but still works and has never given me so much as one problem this entire time, so I'm going to keep using it until it stops working.
That and the apple touchpad to swipe three fingers left and right to switch desktops (and different machines as one desktop is remote desked into a windows box and another terminal+tmux session to a linux box).
Me too. For most things I want all the screen space for the one thing I'm working on. Occasionally I need to look at two things. I almost never need to look at more than two things and I don't have a 100" screen anyway so there wouldn't be space.
I must also be a caveman, I have at most 4 windows open, they are pretty much full screen, and I swap between them with a mouse. I don't even have that many browser tabs open at any given time, maybe 5-10 max. I feel old when I see kids these days using fancy window managers with custom ergo keyboards and no mice, while they hack away in neovim (is that still cool?) and chat on a platform I don't even know exists yet.
Depends. Do you use 49" 3.5:1 ultra wide screen, or a 24" 4:3? If the latter, probably not. If the former, there should be questions. Potentially lots of questions.
I would like to know, coming from a traditional tiling window manager, how does the shortcut workflow look like?
For me the number one thing is having fixed shortcuts á la Super+[0-9] to go to specific windows / workspaces / essentially a specific program. If I can have that, and additionally solving the "worskpace management" problem as TFA described, I'm sold!
Does it make sense to use "workspaces" like this with Niri? For example, one workspace with the browser, one with the editor, one with several terminal columns, and so on. I would need to "switch" (immediately, without animation effects, please) e.g. from "browser" to "terminals".
I find I use Niri in a similar way to other tiling WMs, but instead of having one application per workspace, it lets me keep accessory applications clustered with the main ones. For example, my password manager lives in the same workspace (usually off-screen) as my browser. Whenever I need to generate a password or something, it's right there. Same with whatever accessory terminals I need in addition to my text editor.
You can also try out niri (really paperwm) like tiling in sway (papersway) or hype (hyprscroller). I'm using the later, and it works essentially the same as regular tiling (you can have named workspaces). That said, I notice that I have a lot of muscle memory due to previously working within the constraints of traditional tiling (i.e. You need a new to switch to a new workspace if you open more than 3 terminals, at least on my monitor). I therefore often switch to a new workspace when I really don't need to and get somewhat confused by where things are. I sometimes think a clearer break from my previous way of working might be easier.
That said I really like the approach to tiling from niri and others. It eliminates pretty much all downsides of tiling WMs IMO
Been using i3 for the last year and I feel all of the pain points from this article.
Overall, I deeply prefer i3 to gnome but the "everything gets resized" pain point is very real. Particularly when getting on a lot of calls with Zoom and the "notifications" seem to bypass the build in notifications on the system, instead treating each Zoom notification like it's own window...amplifying the problem.
It wasn't a good fit for me. The strip of windows extending past the border of my screen, sometimes showing half a window, triggered a weird anxiety, it kept drawing my attention. I used it for about two months and then ditched it for a more traditional tiling compositor (hyprland) where windows don't overlap the screen border.
Niri is, however, very pretty from a technical standpoint. Modern Rust codebase, good code structure, very easy to understand and start hacking.
I set my column widths so there's really never a partial window at the edge.
On laptop, it's either full width or 1/2 widths depending on the task, on the ultrawide it's 1/3rd width or full width for editor with internal column splits.
I love the idea of tiling window managers and I've done reasonably long stints with i3 and hyprland, but for some reason, I've always struggled to fully stick with them and have fallen back to Xfce (old habits die hard).
I think what always ends the experiment is that once I reach a certain number of windows, it can be more challenging to manage them if you haven't gone deep enough down the rabbit hole to properly configure workspaces, layouts, etc.
I just fired up Niri, and in 10 minutes I already feel more comfortable than I have with other tiling window managers. It feels immediately intuitive, and the mouse integration is excellent. Maybe it's too early to declare victory, but this really truly looks like exactly what I've been wanting/needing for years. I'll judge how good it is by how long it takes me to think about going back to Xfce ;)
Tiling never worked for me either. Might be because the place I use Linux most is on laptops, where screens are too small to do much tiling aside from maybe splitting the screen in half (and even that doesn’t play nice with things like IDEs). Plain, boring, non-trendy floating WMs/DEs with some lightweight optional tiling has proven most optimal for me.
It’s on laptops where I appreciate tiling the most. Simple hotkey switching between apps (workspaces) is much better than mouse over some taskbar or alt tab tab tab tab.
> Naturally, instead of figuring out what library made a breaking change and spending four hours running git bisect, I decided to throw nearly a decade of muscle-memory and workflow refinements out the window.
I’m also a long time i3/sway user and find Niri quite comfy. I can carry over most of my muscle memory from sway for navigating the focus, moving windows etc. I’ve also found it to be very stable and works out of the box with xwayland-satellite.
My biggest issue is that I keep “losing” windows. I open them in a deeply nested stack, do something else and forgot I already had opened the window.
It also happens with sway to some extent but it’s a lot easier to scroll through all workspaces.
It would be nice to have something like a “window map” bound to Alt-Tab.
FWIW I've got a niri IPC / bash / jq abomination that emulates run-or-raise functionality and works probably better than the original RoR. It cycles through windows matching a particular appId and starts one if one doesn't already exist. That, alongside rofi(wayland) as a fuzzy search nav for all open windows, made a huge difference to me.
I couldn't find a run or raise repo that'd have a ws.jq and I'm not convinced it's https://github.com/thaliaarchi/wsjq (whitespace programing language implemented in jq...)
Could you point at that?
I'm a hyprland zoomer but I used Niri for a bit and it worked pretty well. It slots in perfectly for someone coming from an average single-monitor Windows workflow (for most office-style tasks). I still think that more complex tiling setups have a higher productivity ceiling though. I guess if you're like this guy and keep >10 workspaces open at once you'd have to go with Niri. I wonder if the increased battery life would still hold for someone that only keeps a few windows open at once. 2 hours is insane from just a change of wm
I'm still cycling through wayland and x11, and I also do get 1.5 hours more runtime on average on my old 2nd gen t14s with x11+xmonad+no compositor. It's one of the main reasons I'm struggling to move permanently, as I really don't see any advantage from my perspective as I don't use any desktop environment or feature that would make a compositor actually useful. The only thing I do notice occasionally are black borders due to shadow dropdowns in gtk4 programs that don't respect the system theme I've set.
Niri is inspired by paperWM and it’s so much smoother. If you liked PaperWM then niri might be worth a look.
It does suffer a bit because it’s not built within the gnome environment. So niri is missing a few things that gnome provides “for free.” Niri leaves it up to you find replacements for some pretty basic functionality.
Some things it seems to be missing:
- Desktop notifications
- App launcher
- dock or any sort of list of running apps.
- Xwayland (for seamlessly running x11 applications)
All of these functions must be provided by other separate tools that are not included with niri.
My biggest complaint is the lack of clipboard synchronization between x11 and Wayland. I guess that gnome handles this automatically but it’s not so in niri - Wayland apps have independent clipboard and inability copy paste between Wayland and x11 is very annoying.
There are workarounds but none that I’ve tried so far are satisfactorily convenient and reliable.
It's the distinction between a "window manager" and a "desktop environment" KDE/Gnome/XFCE are DEs that include window managers (KWin/Mutter/xfwm4) along with a suite of other utilities that make up the complete environment.
Conversely, Sway, Niri, Hyprland, i3 are bare window managers. They do not include the suite of tools and it is left up to the user to build their environment as they wish. Fortunately thanks to some defined (FreeDesktop.org & Wayland are big) and defacto standards there is a reasonable degree of interoperability for tools. For myself I pull a decent chunk of the XFCE suite into my Sway config to make my very own, special little environment. A environment that apparently no one else can even begin to figure out how to use but at least nobody asks to borrow my laptop twice.
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I only bring this up because I have seen a dozen or more tiling WMs come and go over the past 20 years, many of which were touted as being "the future." The reality is that the most productivity-enhancing features from tiling WMs were integrated into all the major window managers ages ago, and pure tiling WMs will forever be a niche product.
That means to use them effectively you're going to need to invest a lot of time and effort for realistically incremental gains in productivity, and in return you get the side effect of niche products like these having a lots of rough edges.
It's their superpower, and also they tile if you're into that. I never fell into a particularly useful workflow with tiling window managers myself, but as an invitation into the world of alternative lightweight Linux window managers, it's one of the most powerful demonstrations of the things Linux can do great.
I initially thought that an even better WM would be in the realm of an real-time strategy game camera: an infinite 2D canvas with "keybindable" locations+zooms. Niri has convinced me that my idea was too complicated, and it hits the perfect spot between functionality and usability.
It's like technology gifted to us by aliens from the future.
I have a laptop, 24" centered horizontal centered and a 24" vertical monitor and do a vertical half split for Spotify/teams/shell/outlook, with docs on the laptop screen and ide on the main window full screen. And virtual desktops for design/research, dev and personal.
Sticking with the standard monitor sizes instead of 4k or ultrawide makes screen sharing way simpler as well!
Small gripe, Modern UI design with 10px of padding around everything means most apps and pages HAVE to be full screen to get anything done.
https://pop.system76.com/
They follow ubuntu releases, kind of. The downside, they went all in into their new desktop env - cosmic, and until they release it they won't move on from 20.04..
I really loved the tiling feature in PopOS 20.04 which came out of the box. But then I bought a new laptop, and had to move to arch to use it..
https://github.com/Leleat/Tiling-Assistant
https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/4548/tactile/
I am an i3 convert, but I feel this is very useful, if you don't want a full-blown tiling extension, but want some of the convenience of tiling, this is such a simple solution!
Perhaps the biggest usage difference I'll make switching between a floating and tiling window manager is how I swap windows in those positions. In the tiling case I'll create tabbed containers and position the container tiles accordingly. Then any time I want to switch it's selecting a tab in the container. In the floating use case I just switch and position individually. Most of the time the tabbed container is the easier workflow, rarely the floating one can be a better fit - just depends on what exactly I'm doing at the time.
Overall the difference is relatively tiny and what I really end up wanting to get close to regardless of the tools I'm using is something like that Windows 10 beta period where you could put different applications as tabs in the same window, have the workspace/zone based tiling gestures + shortcuts, but have new things just default to floating windows until I assign them.
In the end... so long as I can position the window somewhere within 2 seconds it really doesn't matter much.
My key bindings are a little different because I use the defaults in Spectacle to do it. More than a decade like that. Program's discontinued but still works and has never given me so much as one problem this entire time, so I'm going to keep using it until it stops working.
https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/mac-window-tiling-i...
That thing works for me. Horses for courses, YMMV.
If that's being a cavemen, I'm a proud one at that.
Deleted Comment
That and the apple touchpad to swipe three fingers left and right to switch desktops (and different machines as one desktop is remote desked into a windows box and another terminal+tmux session to a linux box).
I really love it so far.
I only use tiling on my 21:9 display.
For me the number one thing is having fixed shortcuts á la Super+[0-9] to go to specific windows / workspaces / essentially a specific program. If I can have that, and additionally solving the "worskpace management" problem as TFA described, I'm sold!
Does it make sense to use "workspaces" like this with Niri? For example, one workspace with the browser, one with the editor, one with several terminal columns, and so on. I would need to "switch" (immediately, without animation effects, please) e.g. from "browser" to "terminals".
That said I really like the approach to tiling from niri and others. It eliminates pretty much all downsides of tiling WMs IMO
Overall, I deeply prefer i3 to gnome but the "everything gets resized" pain point is very real. Particularly when getting on a lot of calls with Zoom and the "notifications" seem to bypass the build in notifications on the system, instead treating each Zoom notification like it's own window...amplifying the problem.
I'm going to have to give Niri a try.
default_floating_border none
# make sure pavucontrol is floated; use xprop (cli) to get window title/class/etc
for_window [class="Pavucontrol"] floating enable, resize set height 512, opacity 0.3
# https://faq.i3wm.org/question/61/forcing-windows-as-always-f...
Niri is, however, very pretty from a technical standpoint. Modern Rust codebase, good code structure, very easy to understand and start hacking.
On laptop, it's either full width or 1/2 widths depending on the task, on the ultrawide it's 1/3rd width or full width for editor with internal column splits.
I think what always ends the experiment is that once I reach a certain number of windows, it can be more challenging to manage them if you haven't gone deep enough down the rabbit hole to properly configure workspaces, layouts, etc.
I just fired up Niri, and in 10 minutes I already feel more comfortable than I have with other tiling window managers. It feels immediately intuitive, and the mouse integration is excellent. Maybe it's too early to declare victory, but this really truly looks like exactly what I've been wanting/needing for years. I'll judge how good it is by how long it takes me to think about going back to Xfce ;)
> Naturally, instead of figuring out what library made a breaking change and spending four hours running git bisect, I decided to throw nearly a decade of muscle-memory and workflow refinements out the window.
My biggest issue is that I keep “losing” windows. I open them in a deeply nested stack, do something else and forgot I already had opened the window.
It also happens with sway to some extent but it’s a lot easier to scroll through all workspaces.
It would be nice to have something like a “window map” bound to Alt-Tab.
FWIW I've got a niri IPC / bash / jq abomination that emulates run-or-raise functionality and works probably better than the original RoR. It cycles through windows matching a particular appId and starts one if one doesn't already exist. That, alongside rofi(wayland) as a fuzzy search nav for all open windows, made a huge difference to me.
Thanks for sharing!
Recently I had a good introduction to the scrollable WM experience on GNOME with the PaperWM extension: https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM
It does suffer a bit because it’s not built within the gnome environment. So niri is missing a few things that gnome provides “for free.” Niri leaves it up to you find replacements for some pretty basic functionality.
Some things it seems to be missing:
- Desktop notifications - App launcher - dock or any sort of list of running apps. - Xwayland (for seamlessly running x11 applications)
All of these functions must be provided by other separate tools that are not included with niri.
My biggest complaint is the lack of clipboard synchronization between x11 and Wayland. I guess that gnome handles this automatically but it’s not so in niri - Wayland apps have independent clipboard and inability copy paste between Wayland and x11 is very annoying.
There are workarounds but none that I’ve tried so far are satisfactorily convenient and reliable.
Conversely, Sway, Niri, Hyprland, i3 are bare window managers. They do not include the suite of tools and it is left up to the user to build their environment as they wish. Fortunately thanks to some defined (FreeDesktop.org & Wayland are big) and defacto standards there is a reasonable degree of interoperability for tools. For myself I pull a decent chunk of the XFCE suite into my Sway config to make my very own, special little environment. A environment that apparently no one else can even begin to figure out how to use but at least nobody asks to borrow my laptop twice.
xwayland-satellite gives you XWayland without needing compositor integration.