I love tiling WM’s. This is nothing new; as far as my Linux journey, I’ve been using a tiling window manager for longer than I haven’t been. And I’ve used a lot, some highlights being:

• dwm
• xmonad
• qtile
• awesome
• bspwm
• herbstluftwm
• river
• sway
• Hyprland

There are a couple of noticeable trends on this list. Firstly, I tend to prefer dynamic tilers to manual. But second, I’ve only ever used traditional tiling (as opposed to scrolling). Frankly, I wasn’t aware of scrolling window managers as a thing until Brodie’s videos on Niri.

At first, I found it neat, but not something I would necessarily use. After all, I am very accustomed to my current Hyprland setup. But, I was still intrigued. Fortunately for me, there is a plugin for Hyprland for a scrolling layout called hyprscrolling.

Unfortunately, it is still definitely in-progress, and not fully up to scratch compared to a dedicated scrolling window manager like scroll, which was itself based off of a (now archived) Hyprland plugin for scrolling called hyprscroller. It’s enough to poke around in, but there doesn’t seem to be enough there to fully commit to it, and it doesn’t seem to be enough to fully learn scrolling window management.

As such, I’m putzing around with the idea of setting up Niri, and having both Niri and Hyprland in my dotfiles, at least for a bit. From my (very limited) testing, there are definitely programs I currently use (mostly from the Hypr ecosystem) that just do not work on Niri; this makes sense, Hyprland is based on aquamarine, which comes from wlroots, while Niri is Smithay. Additionally, Niri is made to use the GNOME XDG portal, whereas Hyprland has its own. I don’t yet know how those compare feature-wise, but in my experience the usual sticking point is window-specific recording on OBS.