My Thoughts After One Year Using Niri

So at the beginning of 2026, I moved to using Neary as my window manager. I'd previously been using Qtel for a couple of years prior to that. And then at the beginning of 2026, I moved to Neary because I wanted to try a Wayland compositor. Qtel kind of works with Wayland, but it had a few quirks, you know, a few minor little annoyances where Neary really, I've had nothing but positive experiences with Neary on Wayland. And I also kind of have enjoyed the scrolling aspect of Neary because Neary doesn't call itself a tiling window manager, it calls itself a scrolling window manager. So for 2026, I've been using Neary with a specific shell on top of it. I've been using what is now known as the Dux shell, but until a couple of weeks ago, it was named the Dank Material shell. And this has been a really Comfy experience, again, I installed this almost a year ago and it's funny because I've done almost no customization to either Neary or the Ducks shell since installing this thing. I did some minor configuration in the first couple of days that I set all of this up and then I pretty much just used it like that. So some people have asked me how I'm getting along with Neary and the fact that it's not a traditional Tyler like a Q-Tile or X-Monad or a DWM. It doesn't have that classic. A master stack layout that most tiling window managers kind of have as their default layout. So most traditional tiling window managers, you'll open a program and then maybe open a second program and they'll get tiled side by side. And then you open a third program and then it will split one of these halves into two and you'll have one window on top of a third window. And then maybe you open a fourth and maybe you get one window on one side and then three windows on the other stacked on top of each other. Or sometimes they'll do it in a grid layout where you have a grid of two by two windows. That is typical for tilers. But this, again, Neary calls itself a scrolling window manager. So when I open up third window, what happens is it puts the new window. To the side of the second window. If I open a fourth window, it puts it to the side of the fourth window. Now I can cycle through these. I can actually move focus back to the third window, move focus back over to the second window, move focus back over to the first window. If I want a brief overview, I can hit O on my keyboard, which... Super O gets me the overview where if I want to just move with the mouse, I can move over to the third window with the mouse. If I want to move over to the fourth window, I can. If I Super O and want to just move over the focus using the keyboard, I can use the arrow keys or I can use Super HJKL, which is typically what I'm going to use when I'm moving focus. And again, choose whatever window I want. So naturally, people want to know, which one do I like more? Do I like the traditional master stack kind of layout of your traditional tilers or do I like this scrolling layout with Neary where everything just gets pushed, you know, over to the right in a stack forever to the right. I'll be honest. I could take either one. Neither one of them is necessarily bad. I mean, I'm lived. For years, many, many years, probably the first time I used a tiling window manager, Exmonad was the first tiling window manager I ever used, and I think the first time I used that was like in 2009, 2010. I mean, you're going back 16, 17 years, how long I've been using those traditional tilers. I'm very comfortable in them, but I'm also very comfortable in Neary. There's nothing wrong with me navigating in Neary with all of this. Let me just close all these windows. Let me open up. A few more windows I wanna go over. I just opened five windows. I wanna go over to the second window. I certainly can if I want to. If I wanna close that window, where now I only have one, three, four, and five open, I certainly can if I just wanna close all of them. There's nothing wrong with this. It's very quick and easy to navigate. So for me, yeah, the transition from a traditional tiler like QTile to Neuri was... Dead simple. Like, I didn't miss a beat. There was never a moment where I found anything in Neary weird. It's really not that different than a traditional tiler. Many people imagine that the scrolling thing... is very unique. It's actually not. It's actually, if anything, it's just a different way to tile. I know they call it a scrolling window manager, but it's really just tiling them. It's just a forever tile to the right. So the window manager itself, I had no issues with switching to it. It was very comfortable. The one thing that gave me a little bit of a pause at the beginning using Neary is Neary by default does not have any kind of bar or panel. And at first I thought, well, Well, I'll just go set up. Polybar, you know, some third-party bar, and trying to set up Polybar with Neary was horrible. It was buggy. It didn't have all the functionality I wanted. You know, I spent a couple of weeks with Polybar and realized it was not anything special with Neary, so I was looking for something else, and I realized, well, there's... QuickShell. So QuickShell is basically a series, it's basically a framework to build desktop environments on top of these Wayland compositors like Neary. And anybody can create their own version of a QuickShell on top of Neary. There's several popular ones. One of the most popular ones at the time that I switched to Neary was called Dank Material Shell. DMS is the initials. And a The duck shell, so this just happened. So the duck shell, formerly the Dink Material shell, you can see it's available for Neary, Hyperland, Mango, Sway, LabWC, Skrull, Miracle, and other Weyland compositors. So basically it replaces things like a Weybar. I mentioned Polybar earlier. Weybar was what I used because it's a Weyland compositor. Weybar was very iffy with Neary. I didn't like fooling with it. And then you've got run launchers, for example, like Fuzzle, you got Paul Kit and, you know, all these third party, you know. Pieces of desktop environments that typically when you go build a desktop environment, you go pick a panel and then you go sometimes have to pick parts of the panel, like a specific SysTray that sits in the panel. And then the background services, certain daemons that are running things that manage, for example, your network, things that take screenshots, you know, all kinds of stuff. You got to go find all of these bits and pieces. You don't have to do any of that when you install. A quick shell like Duck's Shell, well I won't say all of them are like this, but Duck's Shell is really a full desktop environment. It has everything you want built into it as far as all the functionality that makes Neary a proper desktop environment. For example, if I move to an empty workspace, the bar at the top is very customizable. You can size it however wide you want. You can put it right up against the side, off to the side, have it floating like I do. You make it at the top, the bottom, the left, or the right. It's very customizable. We'll get into some of that in a minute, but we have this panel here where I can launch an application, a traditional kind of start menu kind of system. I never, ever open this panel. This is probably the fourth or fifth time I've ever opened this menu in the last year of using this thing, because I don't launch programs this way. I actually have Rofi installed. Rofi works fine on Wayland, so if I want to launch a program, I have a super shift enter as the key bind to get to Rofi, and then I can launch something, for example, PCMAN-FM if I want my GUI file manager, right? So I've got that. I never use this, but it's here, Especially for those that are not keyboard- If you're a code-centric kind of people, if you want a point and click menu, you certainly can use this, and it's customizable as well. You can do this grid layout, which honestly, I kinda like the look of this rather than the default layout. We got three different layouts. So we've got this, this, this, actually, I'm cycling through, and there's more than three. I think that was like five different layouts that you could set up for the menus. Again, I don't use this, but it's neat that it's there and then you have apps, then you have files. There is a way to set up a file search, a really nice file search here inside DuckShell. I don't use it. It requires me installing an extra program called Ducks Search and then it indexes all the files on your system so you can quickly search them through this menu. For me, if I'm going to do a file search on the system, I'm going to open up a terminal. I'm going to use GNU Core Utils. Find and grep and all of that stuff. Then you have this plug-ins tab here where what's neat is that you've got power and then it says trigger PW, so PW. If I type PW, it just gets me the power menu right here. So that's kind of neat. So if I go back to all here and type PW, it's a quick way to get to a power menu. I have a quick way to get to a power menu because I actually have a power menu hotkey on my keyboard. You also have the power menu over here. By the way, if you click on, for example, power, you get the power menu over here in that kind of settings. And there are other of those keyboard shortcuts here for some of these plugins like Clipboard CD. I have the clipboard disabled here inside the duck shell and that is something specific to me. You guys are probably going to want a clipboard. I don't use that clipboard because of privacy reasons. I make video content. I can't accidentally open up a clipboard and you guys see things that I've copied and pasted, Especially if it was sensitive information, for example, like. Passwords and usernames, email addresses, things like that. Then you have your workspace switcher here. So we have one workspace, which is the first. Two is what I just went to. If I open something here, automatically there would be a now third empty workspace that I can now. If I go down to, if I open something here, now there's a fourth workspace that I could go down to. If I close this window, though, and go up, that fourth workspace disappears. The third workspace that is empty is still there, if that's the one I wanna go to now, but if I close this one, the third workspace now will disappear when I go to the first workspace, so it dynamically creates and destroys those workspaces depending on what you need, right? So it's really kinda neat, and I kinda like that. As many workspaces available to you as you need, but never more than you need. Now let's talk about the rest of the panel because other than the menu system and the workspace switcher, here in the center you've got some widgets. You've got a date and time widget and a weather widget. And if you click either one of them, you get this window that opens up and you've got overview, media, wallpapers, weather, and digital well-being as tabs. I believe digital well-being is something they just recently added as a new feature here inside the duck shelf from the release just a couple of weeks ago. If I click on Overview, if I want to move around these widgets or even remove a widget, I can, you know, because maybe, I don't know, maybe I don't have use for some of these widgets. Maybe for privacy reasons as a content creator, you don't need the media player because you don't need to see what I'm currently watching off to the side while I'm recording this video or whatever. The media player, though, it is fine. Right now, no media found because I'm not playing anything. But if I'm playing anything that's audio or video related, you will actually see that That information here, you'll see some cases, you'll see like a screenshot from the YouTube video I'm playing, plus you'll see. Like a play and pause button as well. Most of the time when I click this center widget here, though I'm trying to get to wallpapers because I want to change wallpapers. For example, maybe I want to change to a new wallpaper and I just click the wallpaper, right? So this is really cool because this is something I didn't have to set up. One of the things when you install a minimal Linux system with a tiling window manager, in this case a scrolling window manager, Drawing the wallpaper, you know, setting a wallpaper on any of these requires you to install whatever program to set wallpaper, because by default, Linux doesn't have a way to set wallpaper, right? You gotta go install programs that do that for you. I don't have to do that with the DuckShell. It installed that backend for that wallpaper setter. For me, right, and it already has a window here. There's a program to set wallpaper. The only thing I had to do was click the folder icon here and tell it what folder to go look for wallpapers in. That's all I had to do, and that's really nice because this is, again, on some tiling window managers, there's some hoops to go through for some of this stuff. Here, everything just kind of works out of the box. Out of the box, we got a weather widget. All I had to do was give it my geolocation information. The weather here in my area, digital well-being, again, it's rather new. I haven't played with this at all, but you can see my weekly screen time, right? I've put in some time this week on the computer. Of course, this is my office where I do all my recordings and live streams and everything through the week. So yeah, Monday through Friday especially, I do spend a lot of time in front of this machine, the most used apps, you can see the Brave browser, and then TastyTrade, my trading application for my second channel. Of course, I spend a few hours Monday through Friday staring at TastyTrade. And then some of the widgets I have over to the right, and again, this is all customizable. We have a sys tray that I think is here by default, and then you've got things like disk usage, You've got this here, CachyOS up. Uptime and then CPU usage is what this is. And then if I escape out of that, this one here I believe is RAM usage, yeah, memory usage. But the same sysmonitor, it just switches tabs when you click on CPU or RAM, right? It gives you that information. And then the next widget, I actually did add this one, the color picker widget. And again, this is built into DuckShell. This is not a third-party program you gotta go install. It's just a widget that you can enable. And I enabled it because as a content creator, I often, Need to get colors or, you know, I'm doing artistic things where I need a hex code for a color. And that's nice having this right here inside the panel. And then I've got notifications and then the settings panel here where I can do things like turn on and on. Light and dark mode, and of course I've got the lock screen here. I've got the settings. We should open the settings. This is the main settings window here for Ducks. You've got a million different settings available inside the duck shell. I haven't played with maybe 2% of the things you can do with Duckshell. Typically for me, interface style, like you want to do some transparency, you certainly can do that. For me, I don't like transparent bars. I find them hard to read, so I didn't play with any of that. The bar itself, you know, where you want to put it, what kind of style do you want? Do you want a frame or do you want a standard bar? You can go into appearance and you can size it. However, Tall and wide, you want it as well. You've got bar widgets, so here is where you can go and add the things to the left section. So app launcher, separator, workspace switcher. So app launcher is this, and there's a separator, and then there's the workspace switcher, and then there's another separator, and then the focus window information. So that's the left section. Center section, media, clock, and weather. Media, clock, and weather, that's here, right? And I can remove any of these widgets, and I can add new widgets. If I click add widget, if I wanna add something I'm shifting to the left section. Get all these default widgets that I could add, right? So you can customize this panel however you want. You move all these widgets around, you remove them, and then there's widgets that are not here that you could add to the panel. But again, I haven't done a lot of customization with ducks and I haven't done a lot of customization with Niri, the window manager itself. I open a terminal here and let me... Zoom in. If I open, let's open this with Vim. Let me open my Neary config here. I mean, I wrote this two weeks after I first switched to Niri, and I don't think I've ever touched it since. It was essentially the default config. The only thing I added was there's a few applications I need to start up. When Niri first launches. And honestly, I don't really need these. Like I have Waypaper drawing a default wallpaper. I don't necessarily need that anymore. I used to need it because I used Waypaper in the beginning because, again, I was using Waybar. I don't think I really need that now. I do have Emacs, the Daemon, the Emacs server running when I launch Neary. Now that is very important. That way I can immediately use Emacs when I want it. I've got Nextcloud. That launches immediately as well. And then I turn on Sway Idle for powering off monitors, you know, setting them on a timer. That way the monitors go to sleep after it looks like 600 seconds. What is that, five minutes? Other than that, I've set some directories for things like when I take a screenshot. Because out of the box, Neary has a binding to take a screenshot. I could do... I've got mine set to, I think, super colon or something to take a screenshot. I'm not going to take a screenshot, but I just hit that key binding. It saves a screenshot. Where is it? Save it. It saves it to this folder in this format. It's really neat. And I use that all the time. Like when people talk about using programs for screenshots, you know, I use Neary to take screenshots and like the window manager itself takes the screenshots for me. And I use that feature literally every day because I take screenshots to make thumbnails for YouTube. Sometimes I take screenshots, certain sections of applications I'm in, such as we've talked about tasty trade. Sometimes I take screenshots and then. Frame it in such a way to capture like a stock chart that I can share like in the DT options discord. I'm always using that screenshot functionality and it works. And I've got window rules here. What windows do I want floating? What windows do I want not floating but instead of half screen, I want full screen. For example, when I launch the Brave browser, I've got super W as a key binding to launch the Brave browser. You notice it doesn't open. Half a screen, like most things, right? I'm forcing that to always be full screen because every time I open a browser, I want the browser full screen. Like 99 times out of 100, I want the browser to be full screen. I want Discord to be full screen. GIMP, Kdenlive, Qbrowser, another web browser, and TastyTrade, my trading platform. Like those are applications that I never want to be scrunched up into half a screen. They are, they're really designed for You know, taking up the full screen, right? So I've got window rules to force those to do that. And then other than that, you know, I set a few basic key bindings when I first set this up earlier this year. And basically I made the key bindings standard kind of window manager key bindings, right? Where, you know, if I want to move focus, you know, between windows, SuperHJKL for, you know, up, down, left, right, you know, the key bindings. And if I want to move windows around on monitors, for example, this window here, if I want to move it to this is the middle monitor, by the way, you're looking at the second of my three monitors. I also have a monitor to the left and a monitor to the right. Let's imagine I want to move this window to my far left monitor. Well, if I do super shift H to move it left. It's over on that monitor now. If I do super shift L to move it right, it's back on this monitor. If I do super shift L to move it right again, it's now on my third monitor, the far right monitor. So let me move it back and now it's back on this monitor. So just standard kind of Vim motions that for me just make sense, right? I'm using a lot of the same bindings that I've used for nearly 20 years and other window managers like Exmonad, Awesome, Qtile. So Naturally, people want to ask, hey, am I happy with Neary? Yes. Am I looking to move away from Neary? No. I'm one of those folks that typically when something's working, I just let it work. And right now, Neovim with the duck shell, it's working fine for me. I don't need to complicate my life by hopping to something different. As long as this is working for me, I'm just going to stick with using it. And right now, I mean, Neovim is practically perfect for me, right? Right. And it didn't really require any serious customization at all, which is really nice. I think a lot of people do fear, especially really minimal window managers that require a ton of configuration, sometimes learning a new programming language. I know some of you guys, that kind of stuff kind of scares you. You don't really have to do any of that with Neovim. You can be up and running with Neovim with a duck shell. within minutes. And then at that point, you've got a few key bindings to learn that may be taking an hour. And after that, hey, it's just, hey, get your work done. Take care, guys. Peace.