I have tried both of them. They are both powerful on their own respect. Niri is still on its early days so things like floating window are a work in progress (last time I checked), but things like its window management is great if you can set up nice keybinds for the multitude of actions available and its scrolling behaviour works like a charm on laptops. Niri also has a configuration file validator that you can use before restarting Niri which is genius! One thing you might hate or love is the dynamic workspaces, workspaces are moved/renamed so that they are consecutive. So if you had four occupied workspaces ( 1 through 4) and clear workspace 3 now you would have three consecutive workspaces (1 through 3) effectively making workspace 4 now be workspace 3.
River is super fast because of how minimal it is plus it has some nice community layouts available to suit your taste better. Also the tag window management can be the fastest out there but can become hard if not set up properly. It was to cool and all but I feel it is more for power users and it totally overwhelmed me when I tried to set up stuff to set tags for windows and move them around monitors (and that when you move a window to a monitor it does not keep focus on it). The way I use Sway and Hyprland is to set workspaces for different monitors and it just feels easy for me to move windows around focusing(or not) the destined workspace. I think the best feature of River is to toggle any window on your focused tag, it really feels like magic.
Niri has a way to have named workspaces now which basically act like persistent workspaces, so you don’t have to use dynamic workspaces system.
I really like niri and have it as my daily driver
Yeah, my problem with it is that I have to be conscious of what named workspaces are created to know what keybind to hit to switch to them and that they occupy regular workspaces place. I guess one is meant to scroll through them with your touchpad or keybinds, but when you have 5 + workspaces it become inefficient. I think Niri would be better suited for ultra-wide monitor but then one would not have a touchpad… Most importantly when you want to send windows to a particular workspace (other than neighbor workspaces) it can be a nighmare. Probably its just me no being able to figure it out and/or became to accustomed to a particular workflow, #skill_issue.
I feel like you are missing something because I can directly hop around one of my ten workspaces with a single click, without a need of scrolling through the workspaces between. What I do is to create ten named workspaces in startup (I actually only use like five of them but let’s ignore that). Then I can still navigate them by the index number. I don’t use regular workspaces enitrely in my setup.
Note: I only use a single monitor and never move workspaces up or down so I don’t know the experience there.
Oh, I can’t remeber well but here is my question: when you have set 10 named workspaces and only have active #1, #2 and #4… Does not #4 become #3 even if its named? Meaning you can focus the originally #4 workspace? Anyway when I used it(for 3-4days consecutive) I did not think of naming workspaces just 1 to 10 to fix in them in place lmao.
Sorry I saw it earlier but I forgot to respond.
Named workspaces are always active, and they stay in place regardless if there is a window there or not.
Have you tried niri yet? What about river?
I have tried both of them. They are both powerful on their own respect. Niri is still on its early days so things like floating window are a work in progress (last time I checked), but things like its window management is great if you can set up nice keybinds for the multitude of actions available and its scrolling behaviour works like a charm on laptops. Niri also has a configuration file validator that you can use before restarting Niri which is genius! One thing you might hate or love is the dynamic workspaces, workspaces are moved/renamed so that they are consecutive. So if you had four occupied workspaces ( 1 through 4) and clear workspace 3 now you would have three consecutive workspaces (1 through 3) effectively making workspace 4 now be workspace 3.
River is super fast because of how minimal it is plus it has some nice community layouts available to suit your taste better. Also the tag window management can be the fastest out there but can become hard if not set up properly. It was to cool and all but I feel it is more for power users and it totally overwhelmed me when I tried to set up stuff to set tags for windows and move them around monitors (and that when you move a window to a monitor it does not keep focus on it). The way I use Sway and Hyprland is to set workspaces for different monitors and it just feels easy for me to move windows around focusing(or not) the destined workspace. I think the best feature of River is to toggle any window on your focused tag, it really feels like magic.
Hope that helps.
Niri has a way to have named workspaces now which basically act like persistent workspaces, so you don’t have to use dynamic workspaces system. I really like niri and have it as my daily driver
Yeah, my problem with it is that I have to be conscious of what named workspaces are created to know what keybind to hit to switch to them and that they occupy regular workspaces place. I guess one is meant to scroll through them with your touchpad or keybinds, but when you have 5 + workspaces it become inefficient. I think Niri would be better suited for ultra-wide monitor but then one would not have a touchpad… Most importantly when you want to send windows to a particular workspace (other than neighbor workspaces) it can be a nighmare. Probably its just me no being able to figure it out and/or became to accustomed to a particular workflow, #skill_issue.
I feel like you are missing something because I can directly hop around one of my ten workspaces with a single click, without a need of scrolling through the workspaces between. What I do is to create ten named workspaces in startup (I actually only use like five of them but let’s ignore that). Then I can still navigate them by the index number. I don’t use regular workspaces enitrely in my setup.
Note: I only use a single monitor and never move workspaces up or down so I don’t know the experience there.
Oh, I can’t remeber well but here is my question: when you have set 10 named workspaces and only have active #1, #2 and #4… Does not #4 become #3 even if its named? Meaning you can focus the originally #4 workspace? Anyway when I used it(for 3-4days consecutive) I did not think of naming workspaces just 1 to 10 to fix in them in place lmao.
Sorry I saw it earlier but I forgot to respond. Named workspaces are always active, and they stay in place regardless if there is a window there or not.
Oh, thanks!