Now do gaps next.
this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2026
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unixporn
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Love it, I've stopped using bars as well and generally feel better without the clutter.
Are there any ncurces-based programs that can show the info I have usually in a bar and can live in a terminal?
Yeah, I personally use tmux to display battery information (the only thing I need) in my terminal.
You could try configure a fetch program, like fastfetch. For network management I use the nmtui binary that comes bundled in with network manager. I know there is bluetui for bluetooth and wiremix for a basic pipewire audio mixer, but I don’t know about anything else.
I guess, it comes down to: What do I really need to be visible and configurable in one terminal page.
Niri is a Wayland compositor, not a window manager
It’s both. Wayland is meant to be implemented in such way that the compositor is also the window manager. River is a counter example where the team decided to make an extension and decouple the compositor fron the window manager. That said niri is just a standard wayland window manager.
It does both jobs but they're typically referred to as compositors. See basically any description of any project (including niri). Additionally it's confusing because then people have to lookup if it's X or Wayland when we have very obvious terms that we can use to distinguish implicitly
A scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor
Sway and River both use wm as part of their URL: swaywm (see https://swaywm.org/) and riverwm (see https://github.com/riverwm). Calling them only one or the other is wrong, they’re both compositors & window managers.
Though you could argue that a compositor without a window manager is useless, thus a compositor implies the presence of a window manager.
Yes they do but that's likely a vestigial remnant of X11 naming schemes. I could point out labwc, xfwl, hyprland, dwl, etc for counter examples. Yes compositors manage windows, they are not called window managers by the spec.
From the Wayland website
A Wayland server is called a "compositor".
Additionally, there are compositors that leave window management out of their job description, I believe there are a few but the one I remember most is kiwmi which left window management to lua scripts.
Honestly I don’t really understand what’s wrong about calling them that, I do prefer calling them compositors as well, but to the untrained eye window manager is much more clear, and it’s the existential goal of a compositor anyway (in most cases at least). Just because a spec sheet doesn’t call a game engine a 3D renderer doesn’t mean a game engine is not a 3D renderer, because unless it only renders 2D, it is also a 3D renderer, if you get what I mean.
I guess what I'm trying to get at is, a game engine contains a 3D (or 2D) renderer, but that's not its sole focus. There are other projects which are just that, a game engine is a lot of other things too, physics simulator, audio engine, UI framework, etc. A compositor is similar, it's a compositing window manager, a Wayland display server, an input handler, etc. It does far more than manage windows. When we look at X11 all a window manager does is manage windows, composition was a separate application, although sometimes the window manager would handle it, input handling was managed directly by the X server. Basically a Wayland compositor is a compositing window manager, and display server combined into one, it's like a game engine, calling one a 3D renderer is missing out on the vast array of other responsibilities.