something odd about these windows

#niri

this is a completely normal screenshot. nothing unusual here

#niri

Looking for testing and feedback for server-side shadows: https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/pull/990

#niri

ppl from our niri matrix playing around with the new compositor-side shadows! These screenshots are from @r4hulrosh4n and calops (no fedi)

#niri

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

#niri

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

#niri

Why would you even want tabs in niri? Occasionally it's quite useful. For example, when streaming programming, I increase the font size, so I can no longer fit editor + terminal on the screen at once. Scrolling back and forth gets annoying, and tabs feel just right for this.

We just hit 5000 stars!

#niri

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.

https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/pull/1085

#niri

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.

#niri

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.

#niri

You can now (finally) customize the important hotkeys list: https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/wiki/Configuration:-Key-Bindings#custom-hotkey-overlay-titles

#niri

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)

#niri

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.

#niri

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]]

#niri #smithay #wayland #rust

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.

#niri

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.

#niri

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.)

#niri

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.

#niri