After using Hyprland for a little more than a year (before Hyprland I used dwm, another tiling window manager), I switched this week to niri. I don’t exactly remember where I got the idea, but the switch has been sitting in my notes for a month or two, motivated by niri’s horizontal scroll as a default. Hyprland and dwm have both worked well enough, but I have found that I almost never use a window layout more complex than two side-by-side windows—usually a terminal running tmux and firefox—so while features like fibonacci layouts are interesting in theory, they’re lost on me in practice. Moreover, niri is written in Rust.
I don’t think that my config is particularly complex, as I mostly followed what’s demonstrated in this video. But I am already finding it significantly nicer, both on a single laptop screen and on multiple screens at home on my desktop. Rather than treating workspaces as fixed and numbered, and tying certain applications to them, I’m now typically just using one or two workspaces (niri by default keeps one free ‘below’ your last workspace), and letting applications stack out horizontally as I use them. I took the opportunity to also tune some tmux hotkeys around switching panes and windows, and I have to say, my setup now feels markedly snappy.