Niri can have gorgeous animation

I was a huge fan of Niri already. It’s a scrolling tiling window manager. Roughly:

When I open an app it takes the full height and a pre-configured width on the screen.
When I open more apps and the screen was already full, it pushes the existing apps off screen.
It can stack windows in columns to have a more compact view

It means that windows always take the optimal amount of space, and they’re very neatly organized. It’s extremely pleasant to use and keyboard friendly.

A screen recording. A window is at the center of the screen. Then a terminal appears and pushes the window to the half of the screen, and takes the other half. A third terminal appears and pushes the first window off screen, before stacking itself under the previous terminal and restoring balance.

Don’t mind the apparent slowness: this was recorded on a 10 year old laptop, opening OBS is enough to make its CPU go brr. When OBS is not running, Niri is buttery smooth.

But now I’ve learned that Niri supports user-provided GLSL shaders for several animations. Roughly: you can animate how windows appear and disappear (and other events, but let’s keep things simple).

Some people out there have created collections of shaders that work wonderfully for Niri:

My personal favorite is the glitchy one.

A screen recording. We can see glitchy animations when the windows are opened and closed.

In a world of uniform UIs, these frivolous, unnecessary and creative ways to interact with users are a breath of fresh air! Those animations are healing my inner 14 year old.