niri

niri [-c config] [--session] [subcommand]

niri is a scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor. Instead of squeezing windows onto a fixed grid, it arranges them in columns on an infinitely wide horizontal strip: opening a new window never resizes the others, you just scroll to it. Each monitor has its own independent strip and set of dynamic workspaces stacked vertically.Running niri on a TTY starts the compositor directly. Inside an existing session it is usually launched as niri --session, which exports the Wayland and display environment to systemd and D-Bus so that portals and user services work. A running instance can be inspected and controlled over its IPC socket with the niri msg subcommand, which reports outputs, workspaces, and windows and can trigger any of niri's built-in actions.

-c PATH, --config PATH

Load configuration from PATH instead of the default location.

Start as a session: set up the environment and integrate with systemd and D-Bus.

Check the configuration file for errors and exit.

Communicate with the running niri instance (outputs, workspaces, windows, focused-window, focused-output, action, keyboard-layouts, version, event-stream).

Emit the reply as JSON for scripting.

Deliberately trigger a panic, used for testing crash handling.

niri reads a KDL configuration file from $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/niri/config.kdl (falling back to ~/.config/niri/config.kdl). The file defines key bindings, input devices, output layout, window rules, and animations, and is reloaded live whenever it changes on disk.

niri was created by Ivan Molodetskikh (YaLTeR) and first released in 2023. It is written in Rust on top of the Smithay compositor toolkit and is distributed under the GPL-3.0 license. Its column-based "scrollable tiling" model is inspired by the PaperWM extension for GNOME.

sway(1), hyprland(1), swaymsg(1), weston(1)

Source code · Documentation