I've been using tiling WMs for some years now (mostly sway, but also tested cosmic a bit). I really love them: you theme workspaces and organize everything into them, and no window is ever hidden, which makes finding them trivial. But the cost of having every window displayed in that workspace is that they start getting way too small when you have a lot of them. This is usually not a big deal, since you can create tabs or just open new generic workspaces.
But what has been bugging me are windows that need to be big, otherwise they are unusable (like gimp, kdenlive, libreoffice, sometimes firefox). Tabbing them in fullscreen messes with the workspace layout, and if you dedicate an entire generic workspace for them, you surely will lose it.
That's where scrollable WMs enter the scene. They respect window sizes at the cost of their visibility.
niri.gif
NGL, this is not a good idea. It's easy to lose windows that are off-screen. But what if you only use it sometimes? Think of it as a regular tiling WM, but when you need it, it creates more space off-screen.
To achieve this, I've been using Niri with the tilemod script. It helps make Niri behave more like a regular tiling.
tilemod.gif
It's been a good experience over the last week. My workflow is mostly unchanged, but when I need to work with a window in fullscreen, it's always a relief that I'm using Niri.
Has anyone else here tried scrollables? I'm in this excitement phase so I want to read more about it (even from people who tried and didn't like them) :)
I had no idea these scripts existed, that's awesome and i'll have to take a look at tilemod in particular. I've tried niri a bunch of times but similar to you i feel like it's too easy to lose windows. Not just on the same workspace, but i also wish other workspaces could be numbered so you can keep track of which workspaces have which windows on them. I know you're supposed to use the overview for that, but i'm still not used to that type of workflow.
Another thing i would like is to have a more dynamic tiler style option where at the very least you can set it to have a window take up the full screen when it's the only one on the workspace, and then split it side by side when two or more windows are opened. Mangowc's scrolling layout supports this, and upstream niri could probably add this too, but it looks like this tilemod script can do the same thing.
Do you mean static workspaces? You can configure something like that.
By default, Niri uses dynamic workspaces (they are deleted when empty), but you can create persistent ones.
My config file has this:
This means workspaces 1 to 4 will always exist, even if they are empty. If I open something in workspace 3, it stays in 3 no matter what.
Now, if you do something like this:
Then 10 workspaces will always be present (probably the only ones you’ll use). In this way, it may be easier to keep track of where your windows are.
This is my workflow too
Works on the laptop screen or docked on my ultrawide
Named workspaces and window rules to open application windows on a specific workspace
Then I bind super + 1 - 0 to switch between them
1 terminals 2 browsers 3 code 4 slack 5 teams (ugh) 6 discord 7 xfreerdp 8 empty 9 empty 0 keepassxc
When I boot up everything opens in the same place
The overview feature is great in Niri
I also use noctalia mainly for a bar at the top
Hmm, i might have to give this a try. One thing i'm wondering though is will this also allow you to have the workspaces numbered on something like waybar? Right now for my niri config i'm just using icons to indicate how many workspaces are open and which one is focused, but i'm not using numbers right now because of the workspaces not being persistent
I think they are numbered by default in waybar
Yeah i think that's right, i just wanted to confirm that it works with niri when using persistent workspaces, cause i prefer to have them numbered and that's what i use for my other compositors, but niri has always been an exception because of this issue.