Free scroll mode / disabling snapping

[samdesota]

I'm coming to niri from using a custom fork of PaperWM.spoon on MacOS which I made small improvements to over a year or so.

I got tired of fighting apple so I made the leap to nix with niri recently. I've been very impressed with niri so far, but there are couple ergonomics differences that I missed so ended up forking and hacking some in on this branch.

The main thing I did is make it possible to freely move the desktop around without any snapping. It's a little jank right now, I just commented out the snapping code to make this work, but it mostly works with a couple bugs. I use niri with a trackpad and this makes niri feel much smoother for me with three finger swiping to move around.

I'm creating this issue to see if you would consider a more complete PR that adds an option to disable snapping windows to the left / center / right of the screen. I'd also like to add momentum-based scrolling to this, but one step at a time

[samdesota]

My thought is that snapping would only happen when a window focus changes.

[YaLTeR]

So I'm not sure this makes sense. Why would you want no snapping at all? I understand adding snapping to monitor center for the gesture, but why none at all?

[samdesota]

Center snapping often works well, but sometimes you want the content of 2 or more windows fully on the screen but snapping gets in the way. I prefer to use a keyboard shortcut to center things ad-hoc when I want that, so that the snapping isn't preventing me from shifting windows exactly how I'd like. Left and right snapping feels not great with the gesture to me, especially for when there is only a couple of windows open and niri wants me to snap it way to the side on my 32:9 monitor.

It's kinda just a feel and a big part of it as ultra-wide monitor support. Snapping just feels like unnecessary jerkiness, I can use shortcuts to activate the grid like centering or aligning left or right when needed. Also I use focus on hover which is part of it.

Maybe this recording helps give a sense of how it feels to use niri with no snapping, you can also see some of the jank with my current branch where niri won't let me fully move the focused window off the screen, which I'd like to fix.

2025-03-27.12-22-38.mp4

[YaLTeR]

I guess it's a different story with such a wide monitor yeah

[samdesota]

I think I would like snapping on most keyboard actions, just not on focus follows mouse and the scroll gesture.

Maybe this could look like

• An option to disable snapping when scrolling with the gesture
• An option to allow focus follows mouse to focus windows partially outside the view port, but prevent scrolling. Might sound strange but interacting with windows partially outside the view port is something I do pretty frequently
• All other focus actions continue to use the current left / right or centering behavior
• Add a command to trigger bringing the currently focused window fully on the screen, may be one already

[YaLTeR]

focus windows partially outside the view port, but prevent scrolling

this is Not Going To Work because it's fairly well baked into all parts of the code to always try to bring the focused window into the view

[samdesota]

l did manage to get something like this working, I added flag to the function that computes scrolling into view and then propagated it through scrolling.rs. https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/compare/main...samdesota:niri:sdesota/scrolling-changes?expand=1#diff-24e00052eeb5d3cfe29afaf02fbdd632f2cab43f08a6693be62c3510cbae8574R5139