Most desktops ask you to manage windows: resize them, tile them, alt-tab through a stack of them. niri does not have a stack. Windows sit in columns on a strip that scrolls sideways, and you move along the strip instead of arranging a grid. It took me about a week to stop reaching for the old habits. After that, a stacking window manager felt slower to me, mostly because I kept losing track of where the windows went.
The desktop is one package
niri, the bar, the launcher and the colours are assembled through nix-wrapper-modules into a single derivation:
packages.desktop = inputs.wrapper-modules.wrappers.niri.wrap {
inherit pkgs;
imports = [ self.wrappersModules.niri ];
terminal = lib.getExe self'.packages.terminal;
env.EDITOR = lib.getExe self'.packages.neovim;
};The practical part is that installing my desktop is one package and updating it is one rebuild. If the compositor config and the panel config disagree, the build fails, and that is a better place to find out than the login screen.
noctalia-shell is the bar, launcher and control centre on top of it. It uses a gruvbox palette that is defined once in the Nix config and passed to the terminal, the editor, the file manager and the bar. One definition is the difference between a theme and five themes that slowly stop matching.
Keybinds you can look up
A keybind-driven setup only works if you can remember the keybinds, and I could not. What fixed it for me was the which-key.nvim pattern: press the leader, pause, and a menu lists the available continuations with their descriptions, taken from the desc strings the real keybinds already carry. There is no cheat sheet to maintain, because the menu is generated from the bindings themselves.
On the niri side I do the same with a small launcher (self.mkWhichKeyExe) bound to Mod+G: Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, a browser, Discord, a volume mixer. If you are setting up niri, add that lookup early. It decides whether the setup is usable by someone who has not read your config, or only by you.
Keep reading
Part 2 of 8 of NixOS, in pieces.
Where this lives: One flake for every machine I run