Not OP, but my take on this from using i3/sway for years was realizing that I often had two kinds of windows open.

Important long lived ones would be on workspaces where I could jump to them by number. I would have sound mixer and music on 1, mail and instant messaging on 2, browser on 3, then dev stuff or admin tasks etc on 4+. These would stretch horizontally, of course.

What I found was the “+” in “4+” could often be quite a lot of windows. I might have to reference some PDF in order to fill out a form in another PDF, and open a new browser window to manage some other reference document, and screenshots for the final draft, and terminals for taking temporary notes, maybe an image editor to trim screenshots, etc.*

With niri, I still have the “1234” layout but these are now rows with keyboard shortcuts. The ad hoc windows that get pushed onto and popped off my mental context stack grow rightwards… as a stack!

For me, niri’s brilliance is giving me those two axes. Known topics with keyboard navigation on the vertical axis. Ad-hoc tasks within each topic on a push/pop context stack on the horizontal axis.

*Ironically, these multi-window tasks were always the most mundane! Form filling for a mortgage application, say, or managing a report review for multiple authors. Software engineering — one of the more complicated things one can do on a computer, is all very neatly contained inside an IDE / tmux+vim+sh.

In addition to sibling commenter, niri exposes everything over an IPC accessible via its cli (or a socket), so if you wanted, say, a keybind to switch to your terminal, no matter where it is, you could bind it to this:

  niri msg action focus-window --id $(niri msg --json windows | jq '.[] | select(.app_id=="foot") | .id')

Niri has workspaces. By default they're dynamic and removed when left empty, but you can name them (in config or on the fly) and they become permanent. My current workspaces are

  1: notes
  2: browser
  3: code
  4: mail
  5 onward: dynamic or named on the fly

As someone who spends most of his time in nvim and TUIs (yazi, lazydocker, termusic, tmux in ssh ...), Niri is as keyboard centric as you want. Mine is configured to use vim keys.

I’ve used it daily without a trackpad for months now. So, I don’t k on what you’re talking about.

It has felt very "keyboard first" for me. The hotkeys are very customizable.

Niri looks promising to me. After I discovered PaperWM I moved on to Material Shell, which was still the best workflow I've come across to date. It was basically gnome with a 2d grid: you could scroll workspaces left and right and then again on the vertical axis. The author sort of abandoned it (it was a Gnome extension) in order to go all in on their own desktop environment with the same concept. I'm guessing that'll take a while to get off the ground.

Usually you'd have some predefined widths, like 33%, 50% and 67%, and use a shortcut to cycle between them. And you can define window rules to start some applications with different width than your default.

edit: and as fellow niri user, I recommend people try it. I think it's one of the easiest tiling WMs to get into, it feels very natural within minutes.