The development pace had slowed down a little, so I've tagged an alpha release for niri: https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/releases/tag/v0.1.0-alpha.1
Also made a COPR for the occasion, if you're on Fedora: https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/yalter/niri/
A month has passed and a number of important additions have landed in niri, so here's a second alpha release: https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/releases/tag/v0.1.0-alpha.2
Highlights include relative-pointer and pointer-constraints which let Xwayland masterfully handle 3D games mouse look, and popup unconstraining which prevents popups from opening off-screen. I actually made popups place within their window with some padding, which looks quite nice.
Aaahhhhhh another difficult refactor down and niri now does multi-GPU! By which I mean that monitors plugged into secondary GPUs will now light up and work. All the screenshot UI and screencast portal stuff also works just fine. Wouldn't be able to do this as quickly without Smithay's MultiRenderer support and lots of help from @drakulix 😄
I went for the easier strat of always rendering on the primary GPU, but you can also pick render GPU dynamically, which apparently cosmic-comp does, cool!
Tagged niri v0.1.0-alpha.3 with multi-GPU support, borders and other improvements! Multi-GPU was one of the bigger things I wanted to get done before going out of alpha so I guess I'm slowly getting there.
Turns out that if you implement xdg-decoration in your compositor but tell clients that you want CSD, then SDL2 + libdecor clients will break due to a bug. The bug is already fixed, but the fix hasn't made it to any SDL2 release yet, let alone all the runtimes and vendored copies.
Hiding xdg-decoration from clients it is then
I added text rendering to niri using pangocairo, which turned out to be surprisingly simple. It basically "just worked". This unlocks a lot of features, beginning with a hotkey overlay, which should help people get started (suggested by @ju).
I've tagged niri 0.1.0-beta.1 which includes the overlay along with many more improvements: https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/releases/tag/v0.1.0-beta.1
I'm now happy enough with the feature set so in a week I'll release 0.1.0. Time to finally catch up on other projects I've been neglecting.
Well, I'm happy to release the first stable version of niri, my scrollable-tiling compositor: https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/releases/tag/v0.1.0
Very satisfied with the current state, even though there's plenty left to do. Took a lot of time and work but I've certainly learned a lot, and I'm glad to have contributed a bit to Smithay too!
Before adding more animations into niri, I'm making a "visual tests" application. It shows a set of hardcoded scenarios which I can quickly go through and visually check that everything looks right.
It uses solid color rectangles as "windows", but otherwise this is the real niri layout code and real niri + Smithay rendering code, drawing to a GTK GL area.
For example, on the last test you can see that my offscreen code currently clips CSD shadows (during the open animation).
The window opening animation is now live as part of niri v0.1.2: https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/releases/tag/v0.1.2
I'm really looking forward to more animations, but wow they sure do need a lot of care to get right in all the edge cases.
Also, I added a way to programmatically invoke compositor actions, and turns out that's quite useful for making video demos!
Tagged niri v0.1.3: https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/releases/tag/v0.1.3
This one has much improved touchpad gestures with inertia, springs, rubberbanding and everything else I copied from libadwaita, my primary source for things that feel good 
Also thanks @alice for helping and giving feedback on the gestures and for giving a try to the touch support!
Implemented this idea. It means rendering each monitor 3 times always for the screenshot but maybe it's fine? On this laptop 3 monitors × 3 renders takes 2 ms, and there's some unnecessary blocking I forgot to remove.
On the video, note how for me the screenshot UI has Secrets visible, but on the recording afterwards it's always blocked out.
Amidst all the fires being put out, niri 0.1.4 which can block out windows from screencasts! https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/releases/tag/v0.1.4
And also gamma control, focus follows mouse, warp mouse to focus, wheel and touchpad scroll bindings, xdp-gnome 46 support.
Also, every single config option is now documented on the wiki! Which took like an entire week of work (even though I was reusing a lot of my previously written docs in the config). Check it out here: https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/wiki/Configuration:-Overview
Took the whole yesterday and a bit of today, but I've got window closing animations working! These turned out to be tricky because they need storing a snapshot of the surface render tree to draw once the app is gone.
Some apps may start destroying their subsurfaces before the main surface, like alacritty with its sctk CSD, making it very easy to miss parts of the window in the snapshot, and therefore in the closing animation.
Also, windows closing to the left no longer shift the view!
Definitely one of the most complex animations yet: window resizing.
Just the crossfade effect itself took a while to get working with all the window geometries and buffer offsets, and then there's the whole multiple window orchestration with Wayland's asynchronous nature. (I don't do animation transactions yet, that'll be a whole other level of complexity on top.)
Happy with the result though, and it's cool that it seamlessly works with block-out-from screencast.
Window movement across columns is now animated too!
These weren't complex per se, but very *finicky*. Spent quite a bit of time chasing down all the offsets and coordinates to add and subtract to avoid jumps, but it seems to all work well now!
All the animations, plus VRR, today in niri 0.1.5: https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/releases/tag/v0.1.5
I also remade the demo video to showcase the animations and some of the newer features!
Another tricky feature, rounded corners! Took several days, but I believe I've got a pretty complete implementation.
You (manually) set the window corner radius and whether to force-clip the window. You can set radius per-corner to match GTK 3 apps. It works correctly with subsurfaces, blocked-out windows, transparency, gradient borders, resize and other animations.
Optimization-wise, opaque regions and even overlay plane unredirection work where possible!
https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/discussions/325Added (stole from GNOME Shell as usual) a screen transition action, so now I can finally switch between dark and light in style
(of course, it works with blocked-out windows)
Okay, time for an actually useful feature: interactive mouse resizing (yes, finally). This was, as it goes, quite fiddly to implement, especially since niri has to negotiate with the window during the process.
I also added a double-resize-click (i.e. trigger a resize twice quickly) gesture to reset the window height or to toggle full width. Suggested by FreeFull on our Matrix and worked out very well! Really starting to feel quite nice with mouse.
(still no transactions yet)
Since I'm in a mouse gesture mood today: hooked up the horizontal touchpad swipe to Mod + middle mouse drag and omg it feels so good with the spring deceleration and all
(of course it also correctly avoids the touchpad scaling, so that when using the mouse gesture, the cursor location is always exactly anchored to the view position)
Now for something fun. I'm experimenting with the ability to set custom shaders for animations. Today I added custom shader support for window-close, which lets me make this cool falling down animation!
This is entirely optional of course, and there's no performance impact if you don't use it. Also, custom shaders, like the rest of the niri config, are live-reloaded, making it easy to play around with them.
Been fixing quite a bit of interactive resize jank and other small stuff since the last time, but also added custom shader support for window-open, thus completing it for all three main window animations (open, close, resize).
Now I didn't actually have any good idea of what I might want in a window open custom shader (I like the default), so I made a simple expanding circle animation to showcase it.
Niri 0.1.6 with interactive window resizing, rounded corners, named workspaces, mouse view scrolling, animation custom shaders, screen transition!
https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/releases/tag/v0.1.6
Didn't realize quite how many release notes there would be this time; even had to use an extra level of headings. 😅
Over the past few weeks I've been working on fractional scaling for niri. A simple implementation took about a day, but to do it *properly* I had to refactor the entire layout code to work in floating-point.
The result is well worth it though. Borders, gaps and windows are always physical-pixel aligned, and not restricted to integer logical pixel positions. There's no blur or position-dependent +-1 px jank. Fractional-scale-aware clients remain crisp at any scale.
Phew, finished the initial implementation of window screencasting in niri! Complete with stream resolution change on window resizing.
Some details are still iffy regarding frame timing and frame callbacks, especially to obscured windows, but it *should* work decently fine for now.
niri v0.1.7 is out with fractional scaling, window screencasts and many smaller improvements!
Oops, looks like niri had outstarred PaperWM on GitHub 🙈
PaperWM introduced me to (and made me fall in love with) scrollable tiling. It's a solid implementation on top of GNOME, so you get all the benefits of running a stable and well-supported DE (and Xwayland). PaperWM is also a very direct inspiration for many parts of niri!
Implemented the thing where you can toggle the mouse pointer on the screenshot after the fact (by pressing P). Gonna add a help panel here soon to remind you of this.
Much better
key repeat + scrollable tiling = fun
One of the niri users has contributed a gradient interpolation color space setting! Now you can do pretty gradient borders in srgb-linear, oklab and oklch (in all four hue directions).
I made a COPR for git builds of niri: https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/yalter/niri-git
Apparently this is a thing you can do; relatively easily, even. It's fully automatic, triggers on a webhook from GitHub.
Thanks Michael (my4ng) from our Matrix channel for showing me the relevant docs and doing the initial work!
Spent a better part of today, but I've got dmabuf modifier negotiation fully working in my pipewire screencasting code in niri! This happens to finally fix screencasting on NVIDIA GPUs. Still haven't got any GStreamer pipeline working though, maybe needs a pipewire update.
Apparently, my AMD selects a BGRA format modifier that has two planes. Some out of band info I suppose. And on Intel a preferred BGRA modifier has three entire planes!
My Wayland compositor, niri, turns one today! 
Here's v0.1.8 with bind key repeat, screenshot UI pointer toggle, gradient color spaces, wlr screencopy v3 and output management, and lots of other improvements: https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/releases/tag/v0.1.8
omg, my friend drew a birthday nirik 
i recorded a demo video for the focus-follows-mouse section to showcase it lol
Several days and a lot of hair pulling later, I *think* I got resize transactions working?? Maybe? Hopefully?
Resize transactions is when all windows that must resize together, resize together, with no mismatching frames in between. For example, all windows in a column must add up to the full screen height.
This requires correct configure acks on the client (looking at you, Blender) and very careful state update delaying and resize throttling on the compositor side.
narrator: there was still one case where it didn't work due to a bug
okay, surely this time it definitely works for all correctly written clients
Here's one mainly for people who disable animations: window closing now runs in a transaction with the other windows resizing. This means, no background flicker.
There's been another logo discussion in the niri Matrix room with some quite interesting concepts emerging. Here's one by Endg4me_ with edits by bluelinden and myself, and inspiration from a concept by ElKowar.
What do you think?
I'm working on an "event stream" IPC for niri where you get notified about events as they happen. For example, "workspace switched" or "keyboard layout changed".
To give it a good test, I actually started implementing native niri support in Waybar. You can give it a try too: https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/pull/453#issuecomment-2317110904
I finished the initial event stream IPC implementation for niri. My Waybar fork implements a decent amount of the modules niri/workspaces, niri/window, niri/language. Please give that a try, also anyone who makes IPC scripts or bars please give a try to the event stream IPC itself so we can find any design flaws before merging.
The PR you will need: https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/pull/453#issuecomment-2321730996
Waybar fork is linked from there.
The other day, Christian Meissl finished updating and publishing the libdisplay-info bindings [1]. This is quite exciting because, unlike edid-rs, it can parse the manufacturer/model/serial from pretty much any monitor.
So, today I spend a few hours integrating the manufacturer/model/serial monitor addressing all throughout niri: config, IPC, niri msg, screencast output selector. You should now be able to write/use "SomeCompany CoolMonitor 1234" everywhere!
Set up CI rustdoc publishing for niri-ipc: https://yalter.github.io/niri/niri_ipc/
This has the entirety of the niri IPC documented, including the new event stream events.
this is a completely normal screenshot. nothing unusual here
Looking for testing and feedback for server-side shadows: https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/pull/990
ppl from our niri matrix playing around with the new compositor-side shadows! These screenshots are from @r4hulrosh4n and calops (no fedi)
Added shadow support for layer-shell surfaces!
Though unfortunately layer-shell has no way to signal the visual geometry, so this only looks right if the layer surface doesn't have its own margins.
https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/wiki/Configuration:-Layer-Rules#shadow
I'm adding tabs to niri. Instead of some separate mode, they're just changing how a column is displayed. This means all your hotkeys and everything works exactly the same with tabs. Which was a wonderful UX idea by @elkowar!
I've got a draft PR going with some design and UX questions, please feel free to try it and give feedback: https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/pull/1085
A ton of changes in the tabs PR over the past few days. Mainly various options (tabbed display by default, tab indicator position, etc.).
Just finished with a big one: you can now place the tab indicator within the column rather than "outside". This is needed for thicker tab bars, since otherwise they overlap adjacent windows.
I merged tabbed columns into niri! Now you can play around with them using your nearest niri-git package. With working animations and all 
Noticed tabs can sometimes be useful for comparing windows without taking screenshots. Here for example I'm running the Adw demo from F41 vs. nightly Flathub, showing the slight color difference and apparently a 1 px layout shift.
Another cool suggestion by @elkowar: you can now match windows recorded by an active window screencast. For example, to highlight the casted window with a different color.
You can now (finally) customize the important hotkeys list: https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/wiki/Configuration:-Key-Bindings#custom-hotkey-overlay-titles
Today in *very long* overdue features (looks like I opened the issue even before v0.1.0): moving the mouse against a monitor edge now scrolls the view during drag-and-drop.
(before this change, you had to use the keyboard for this, and yes it was very awkward)
Another neat new thing: a bind to expand column to available width. Basically, "expand to fill empty space".
But, a bit smarter: with scrollable tiling we can have windows partially off-screen. This bind ignores such windows, making it easy to position things to exactly fill the screen, even in the middle of a scrolling layout.
Today I'm releasing niri v25.02 with tabs, shadows, DnD view scrolling, and a ton of other improvements! Read the release notes at https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/releases/tag/v25.02 and @ your distro to update the package.
[[honestly wtf how did so much stuff happen, it's been barely over a month]]
This is not on main yet, but I've heavily reworked how offscreening works in niri.
Offscreening is when you render a group of elements to a separate texture, then draw that texture to the final render. In niri it's used for window opening and resize animations, and now also for full-tile opacity changes.
Before, it was very simple: every frame create a new texture and render it from scratch. The new code caches textures and does full damage tracking both "inside" and "outside" the offscreen.
In practice this means much less texture re-creations and much less redrawing.
The main reason to do this was to unlock using offscreens for more persistent visuals. E.g. it's fine to do some extra rendering for a 150 ms animation, but it's not fine to do it for something that can last seconds or minutes.
In particular, I can finally make windows semitransparent while dragging them in the tiling layout! Which needs an offscreen since it's a stack of border + window + subsurfaces.
Still testing this one: a window rule to set the xdg-toplevel Tiled state.
By default niri matches it to prefer-no-csd, because the Tiled state currently happens to be the best way to ask always-CSD windows to square their corners.
With this tiled-state window rule you can override it, for example to get title bars (for easy mouse-only gestures) together with square corners (if you're going for a square style with borders, like mine here). You can also e.g. limit it to tiled windows.
And another thing for today: finally made it so niri waits a bit for the lock screen to paint before locking the session. This fixes the "red flash" issue.
Please test this since it's security sensitive. I already caught one mistake before pushing where killing a lock screen, then spawning a new one, would briefly flash the session contents.
(Note that some lockers fade in from transparency, so you'll still briefly see red, that's just the niri locked session background.)
Since adding tabbed columns, just about everyone is asking for a way to open a new window directly in the focused tabbed column. This is rather complicated, but yesterday I came up with a 1 line change that should cover some workflows (covers how I use tabs at least).
I have logic that restores the view position when you open and close a window right away. Now I enabled it for consume-left, which means that you can open a new window, consume left (into a tab), and the view will go back.
Today I implemented a new niri screencasting feature: the dynamic cast target.
It shows up as a special "window" in the portal dialog. Once you select it, you can change what it casts with niri binds! Switch between windows, monitors, and in the future maybe workspaces and other stuff. Works with OBS, browsers, anything else.
I also wrote a wiki page with all our screencasting-related features: https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/wiki/Screencasting
Thanks @elkowar for coming up with the dynamic cast idea!
Had to show slides a few times for uni lately, which motivated me to add this next feature.
Windowed fullscreen, also known in other WMs as fake or detached fullscreen, makes the window think that it went fullscreen, while in reality keeping it as a normal window. Useful in combination with apps like Google Slides to hide the browser UI without taking up the whole screen, especially on ultrawide monitors.
Wiki section: https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/wiki/Screencasting#windowed-fakedetached-fullscreen
@YaLTeR really wanna try this but afraid to leave Gnome. When I was younger I tried to configure i3wm. It's fun for a bit but then you don't have UI for choosing a WiFi network or to launch an application. So I got overwhelmed and gave up because I did wanna use my computer.
I wish I could just have this in gnome...
Everytime you show something it looks so fun.
I feel like I would wanna have a big rotary encoder to scroll along the windows from left to right.
@pethil yea it's definitely effort to set things up. Would be cool to have a preconfigured package kinda like fedora spins sometime
For now if you want to try scrollable tiling, you can try PaperWM, it works on top of GNOME: https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM
@YaLTeR i was afraid you'd say that 🙈
Oh well there must be some things left where's GNOME still better 😋
@ju it's certainly a bit annoying for area recording, but aside from that it's very robust
I am regularly trying to get Kooha to work, but there seems to be some problem in gstreamer-pipewire where it doesn't want to connect with my DMABUF-only screencasting
@VBB hey, you can use my COPR: https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/yalter/niri
That'll give you a few utilities like fuzzel (app launcher) and swaylock (screen locker), but no bar and no xwayland-satellite. So you'll still need to do some configuring for a comfortable session (though, everything else will work out of the box, including portals, etc.).
There are some COPRs for xwayland-satellite, haven't tried them: https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/fulltext/?fulltext=xwayland-satellite
@ryanabx they use the same thing as border and focus ring, which is unfortunately simply a window rule for geometry corner radius. If you don't window rule it, it will assume that the window has square corners. And if you do set a corner radius with the window rule, the shadow will also use the correct corner radius.
A Wayland protocol for toplevels to tell what their CSD corner radius is would be real nice here
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