Overview

Overview

^{Since: 25.05}

The Overview is a zoomed-out view of your workspaces and windows. It lets you see what's going on at a glance, navigate, and drag windows around.

niri-overview-release.mp4

Open it with the toggle-overview bind, via the top-left hot corner, or using a touchpad four-finger swipe up. While in the overview, all keyboard shortcuts keep working, while pointing devices get easier:

• Mouse: left click and drag windows to move them, right click and drag to scroll workspaces left/right, scroll to switch workspaces (no holding Mod required).
• Touchpad: two-finger scrolling that matches the normal three-finger gestures.
• Touchscreen: one-finger scrolling, or one-finger long press to move a window.

Tip

The overview needs to draw a background under every workspace. So, layer-shell surfaces work this way: the background and bottom layers zoom out together with the workspaces, while the top and overlay layers remain on top of the overview.

Put your bar on the top layer.

Drag-and-drop will scroll the workspaces up/down in the overview, and will activate a workspace when holding it for a moment. Combined with the hot corner, this lets you do a mouse-only DnD across workspaces.

niri-overview-dnd-across-ws.mp4

You can also drag-and-drop a window to a new workspace above, below, or between existing workspaces.

niri-overview-insert-between.mp4

Configuration

See the full documentation for the overview {} section here.

You can set the zoom-out level like this:

// Make workspaces four times smaller than normal in the overview.
overview {
    zoom 0.25
}

To change the color behind the workspaces, use the backdrop-color setting:

// Make the backdrop light.
overview {
    backdrop-color "#777777"
}

You can also disable the hot corner:

// Disable the hot corners.
gestures {
    hot-corners {
        off
    }
}

Backdrop customization

Apart from setting a custom backdrop color like described above, you can also put a layer-shell wallpaper into the backdrop with a layer rule, for example:

// Put swaybg inside the overview backdrop.
layer-rule {
    match namespace="^wallpaper$"
    place-within-backdrop true
}

This will only work for background layer surfaces that ignore exclusive zones (typical for wallpaper tools).

You can run two different wallpaper tools (like swaybg and swww), one for the backdrop and one for the normal workspace background. This way you could set the backdrop one to a blurred version of the wallpaper for a nice effect.

You can also combine this with a transparent background color if you don't like the wallpaper moving together with workspaces:

// Make the wallpaper stationary, rather than moving with workspaces.
layer-rule {
    // This is for swaybg; change for other wallpaper tools.
    // Find the right namespace by running niri msg layers.
    match namespace="^wallpaper$"
    place-within-backdrop true
}

// Set transparent workspace background color.
layout {
    background-color "transparent"
}

// Optionally, disable the workspace shadows in the overview.
overview {
    workspace-shadow {
        off
    }
}