A scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor.
Getting Started | Configuration | Setup Showcase
About
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.
Features
- 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
Video Demo
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
Status
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.
Media
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.
How to test a Wayland compositor? · October 2026
My talk about some testing techniques used in niri: property-based tests, snapshot tests, client-server tests. The first half overlaps with my RustCon talk, the second half is new. The talk is in Russian, but I prepared full English subtitles that you can find in YouTube's subtitle language selector.
Contributing
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.
Inspiration
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.
Tile Scrollably Elsewhere
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.
Contact
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