Niri Debuts As A Scrollable-Tiling Wayland Compositor Inspired By PaperWM
www.phoronix.com

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!

  • stepanzak@iusearchlinux.fyi
    5·
    11 months ago

    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?

    • Deceptichum@kbin.social
      13·
      11 months ago

      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.

      • flubba86@lemmy.world
        5·
        11 months ago

        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.

      • Aatube@kbin.social
        3·
        11 months ago

        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.

      • stepanzak@iusearchlinux.fyi
        1·
        11 months ago

        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.