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5 days agoRofi is certainly a great choice, though it relies on scripts to customize it to your needs. These scripts can be anywhere from extremely basic to insanely complex but you have to create them.
Personaly I use it as:
- an app launcher
- a clipboard manager
- an infobar to show things like the date/time, memory usage, disk space, battery level, wifi signal…
- an omnibar to perform an internet search, quick units conversions
- a calculator for simple math
- a bookmark manager (list, open, edit, add, remove)
- a password/2FA token manager (list, edit, add, remove, autofill internet fields)
- a wifi manager
- a vpn manager
Tiling WMs are incredibly powerful tools for boosting productivity. Over the years, I’ve tried several: awesome, i3, and dwm. Eventually, I settled on bspwm, which I’ve used for years. It offers far more than you’d expect from a traditional tiling WM—especially thanks to its excellent IPC. That’s why I couldn’t switch to Wayland for the longest time—none of the available options came close to what bspwm gave me.
But just two days ago, I discovered niri, and it completely changed my perspective. It felt like the first time I ever used a tiling WM—like a whole new world had opened up.
Niri fits into the same category as bspwm but takes window management even further. It introduces infinite horizontal scrolling, a novel approach that complements traditional tiling layouts. Combined with a robust IPC (something essential for my workflow), niri allows you to arrange windows dynamically in ways I’ve never seen before—including tabbed layouts that act as a vertical counterpart to its horizontal scroll.
Here’s a short video that only scratches the surface of niri’s potential, but it’s enough to spark your imagination about how customizable and flexible it really is. Personally, I’m deeply grateful to the developers for giving me a reason—and a way—to finally switch to Wayland. I had been desperately waiting for a reliable, robust, and fully-featured tiling WM for Wayland—and what I got was a unicorn I never even imagined.