A scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor.
Getting Started | Configuration | Setup Showcase
Windows are arranged in columns on an infinite strip going to the right. Opening a new window never causes existing windows to resize.
Every monitor has its own separate window strip. Windows can never "overflow" onto an adjacent monitor.
Workspaces are dynamic and arranged vertically. Every monitor has an independent set of workspaces, and there's always one empty workspace present all the way down.
The workspace arrangement is preserved across disconnecting and connecting monitors where it makes sense. When a monitor disconnects, its workspaces will move to another monitor, but upon reconnection they will move back to the original monitor.
- Built from the ground up for scrollable tiling
- Dynamic workspaces like in GNOME
- An Overview that zooms out workspaces and windows
- Built-in screenshot UI
- Monitor and window screencasting through xdg-desktop-portal-gnome
- You can block out sensitive windows from screencasts
- Dynamic cast target that can change what it shows on the go
- Touchpad and mouse gestures
- Group windows into tabs
- Configurable layout: gaps, borders, struts, window sizes
- Gradient borders with Oklab and Oklch support
- Background blur for windows and layer-shell surfaces
- Animations with support for custom shaders
- Live-reloading config
- Works with screen readers
demo.mp4
Also check out these videos that showcase a lot of the niri functionality:
- Niri Is My New Favorite Wayland Compositor by Brodie Robertson
- How Is niri This Good? Live Demo + Config by Nick Janetakis
Niri is stable for day-to-day use and does most things expected of a Wayland compositor. Many people are daily-driving niri, and are happy to help in our Matrix channel.
Give it a try! Follow the instructions on the Getting Started page. Grab a desktop shell like DankMaterialShell or Noctalia (or build a more traditional setup): niri by itself is not a complete desktop environment. Also check out awesome-niri, a list of niri-related links and projects.
Here are some points you may have questions about:
- Multi-monitor: yes, a core part of the design from the very start. Mixed DPI works.
- Fractional scaling: yes, plus all niri UI stays pixel-perfect.
- NVIDIA: seems to work fine.
- Floating windows: yes, starting from niri 25.01.
- Input devices: niri supports tablets, touchpads, and touchscreens. You can map the tablet to a specific monitor, or use OpenTabletDriver. We have touchpad gestures, but no touchscreen gestures yet.
- Wlr protocols: yes, we have most of the important ones like layer-shell, gamma-control, screencopy. You can check on wayland.app at the bottom of each protocol's page.
- Performance: while I run niri on beefy machines, I try to stay conscious of performance. I've seen someone use it fine on an Eee PC 900 from 2008, of all things.
- Xwayland: integrated via xwayland-satellite starting from niri 25.08.
niri: Making a Wayland compositor in Rust · December 2024
My talk from the 2024 Moscow RustCon about niri, and how I do randomized property testing and profiling, and measure input latency. The talk is in Russian, but I prepared full English subtitles that you can find in YouTube's subtitle language selector.
An interview with Ivan, the developer behind Niri · June 2025
An interview by a German tech podcast Das Triumvirat (in English). We talk about niri development and history, and my experience building and maintaining niri.
A tour of the niri scrolling-tiling Wayland compositor · July 2025
An LWN article with a nice overview and introduction to niri.
If you'd like to help with niri, there are plenty of both coding- and non-coding-related ways to do so. See CONTRIBUTING.md for an overview.
Niri is heavily inspired by PaperWM which implements scrollable tiling on top of GNOME Shell.
One of the reasons that prompted me to try writing my own compositor is being able to properly separate the monitors. Being a GNOME Shell extension, PaperWM has to work against Shell's global window coordinate space to prevent windows from overflowing.
Here are some other projects which implement a similar workflow:
- PaperWM: scrollable tiling on top of GNOME Shell.
- karousel: scrollable tiling on top of KDE.
- scroll and papersway: scrollable tiling on top of sway/i3.
- Hyprland has a built-in scrolling layout.
- Paneru and PaperWM.spoon: scrollable tiling on top of macOS.
Our main communication channel is a Matrix chat, feel free to join and ask a question: https://matrix.to/#/#niri:matrix.org
We also have a community Discord server: https://discord.gg/vT8Sfjy7sx
客制化 Niri
在 window-rule 添加以下规则以启用（屏幕捕获自动强制渲染）:
window-rule {
#match app-id="appid"
force-render true #启用离屏渲染
force-render-fps 120 #离屏渲染fps限制，不加则无限制
}
该功能补全（弹窗模糊，透明剔除）仅对实时模糊（xray false）有效 dms 取消背景压暗功能时，launcher 输入法 blur 区域会无效，暂时不知道怎么解决
包括窗口模糊，layer 模糊，弹窗模糊
例：
blur {
passes 4
radius 2
noise 0.1 // 噪点
ignore-alpha 0.1 // 透明度剔除
saturation 1.0 // 饱和度
}
window-rule{
match app-id="appid"
background-effect{
xray false // false 为实时模糊
blur true
noise 0.1 // 噪点
ignore-alpha 0.1 // 透明度剔除
saturation 1.0 // 饱和度
}
}
layer-rule{
background-effect{
xray false
blur true
noise 0.1 // 噪点
ignore-alpha 0.1 // 透明度剔除
saturation 1.0 // 饱和度
}
}
建议 blur 规则
layer-rule{
match namespace="gtk4-layer-shell"
match namespace="selection"
match namespace="swww-daemon"
match namespace="linux-wallpaperengine"
match namespace="noctalia-bar-exclusion*"
match namespace="noctalia-bar-content*"
match namespace="noctalia-image-cache-renderer*"
match namespace="noctalia-dock-peek*"
match namespace="^dms:.*:background$"
background-effect{
blur false
}
}
配置如下：
在 focus_ring 或者 border 中配置
border {
fade-duration-ms 500 // 渐变时长
gradient-spin-speed 45 // 颜色变化速度（角度）
}
窗口捕获时（应用不自行绘制光标的时候）可以绘制光标，不过目前无法通过 OBS 设置取消绘制。 参考 Naxdy/niri@defae6a 并修复 bug
实现 shm 屏幕录制 YaLTeR#1791 上游已合并，改用上游实现。
透明屏蔽
window-rule {
#match rule
transparent-block true
}
全屏窗口是否遵循透明度设置
window-rule {
#match rule
opacity-on-fullscreen true
}
允许自定义全屏背景颜色 YaLTeR#3004
layout {
fullscreen-backdrop-color "transparent"
}
窗口超椭圆圆角系数，默认 2.8，如果设置为 2.0 则为普通圆角
window-rule {
#match rule
rounding-exponent 2.8
}
layer-rule {
#match rule
rounding-exponent 2.8
}
window layout 提供当前窗口在当前 Output 的逻辑坐标 （Window location） 和 显示器名称（Monitor name）
> niri msg pick-window
Window ID 60: (focused)
Title: "niri msg pick-window ~"
App ID: "com.mitchellh.ghostty"
Is floating: no
PID: 3604487
Workspace ID: 10
Layout:
Tile size: 948 x 1023
Scrolling position: column 2, tile 1
Window size: 940 x 1015
Window offset in tile: 4 x 4
Window location: 964 x 49
Monitor name: DP-2
引入 YaLTeR#2659，不过不知为何 background-in-working-area-only 似乎没有生效