Scratchpads for quick access to often used windows

[dantefromhell]

Niri looks awesome, great work!

I'm considering switching but my workflow is making heavy use of scratchpads for easy terminals and note taking across multiple monitors.
From reading the wiki it doesn't look like such a feature is natively available in niri (nor wayland in general).
Has anyone set something similar up for themselves?

[YaLTeR]

Thanks! Yeah, there's no scratchpad in niri atm. Maybe after the floating layer is implemented, it can be something on top of that.

[diniamo]

I'd love to have scratchpads as well.

Additionally to the "traditional" way of using scratchpads, it'd be great to have a way to spawn a command on scratchpads when they are opened empty. I personally use a scratchpad-per-app workflow, where each scratchpad is used to overlay one app over my regular workspaces.

[diniamo]

No, special workspaces handle tiling and floating the same way as normal ones (additionally, there is an option to set the effective workspace scale, which determines how much of the monitor to use for the workspace, practically acting as outer gaps). A special workspace can only be active on one monitor, and one monitor can only have one active special workspace. They are overlayed on top of the actual workspace with a configurable dim behind them.

There is some weird behavior surrounding them (eg. when dragging floating windows between special workspaces and other monitors), but that has been minimized over the releases, they work really well now.

[BRS5672023]

Actually, I would say the special workspace utility on hyprland is not so desirable in my case: most of the time I want a specific special workspace to have only one client running there, once I create a new window, it should be put into my normal workspace (though this could be done via scripts), especially when I run steam in a special workspace, I'd want my game launched there will run outside of this special workspace; another thing I don't feel very comfortable is that I want certain clients of special workspaces to have a fixed size (e.g., a terminal-based music player which should be present in an appropriate aspect ratio so that there's no big black bars on left-right or top-bottom sides when displaying a music cover), and I may also want to put it on the left or right side on my screen. Currently the special workspace on hyprland does not support setting gap sizes of left-right and top-bottom separately (while it is doable in the general section when set the gaps between windows and monitor edges), so I have to make the window floating in my special workspace, but then it can be changed in size and moved on position.. On the other hand, the scratchpad function provided by pyprland behaves more desirable than the special workspace function for me, it will resize and reposition the clients in scratchpads according to its config each time I toggle the scratchpad.

[YaLTeR]

@diniamo interesting. I guess right now in niri you can somewhat emulate this if you make a named workspace like workspace "qalculate" where you spawn qalculate-qt (e.g. via spawn-at-startup + window rule open-on-workspace), then turn on input { workspace-auto-back-and-forth; } and bind a key to focus-workspace "qalculate". Then, hitting that key will focus the qalculate workspace, and hitting it again will focus the previous workspace that you had focused.

[diniamo]

That is very close, but I want to avoid window rules. Isn't there a way (again, like in Hyprland) to execute an app and specify a target workspace? In Hyprland that would be exec, [workspace 5] qalculate-qt.

[YaLTeR]

Not atm but I was thinking about something like that. Don't have an exact good design in mind yet.

[FelixSchausberger]

Now that we have floating window support starting from 25.01, has anyone managed to set up a scratchpad workflow with it?

[murlakatamenka]

As I get it floating windows themselves didn't change much for scratchpads.

Here is something that works (as suggested here)

// show/hide workspaces with a single bind/hotkey
input { 
    workspace-auto-back-and-forth
}

// autostart
spawn-at-startup "kitty" "--class" "scratchpad"

// special workspace
workspace "scratchpad"

window-rule {
    match app-id="scratchpad"

    open-on-workspace "scratchpad"
    open-floating true
}

// show/hide scratchpad terminal
binds {
    Super+Backslash { focus-workspace "scratchpad"; }
}