niri/wiki/Overview.md

Overview

^{Since: next release}

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.

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

• Mouse: left click for interactive-move, right click to scroll a workspace left/right (no holding Mod required).
• Touchpad: two-finger scrolling that matches the normal three-finger gestures.
• Touchscreen: one-finger scrolling, or one-finger long press for interactive move.

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 and remain under 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 if you hold it above for a moment. Combined with the hot corner, this lets you do a mouse-only DnD across workspaces.

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/5f09c5b7-ff40-462b-8b9c-f1b8073a2cbb

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

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/b76d5349-aa20-4889-ab90-0a51554c789d

Configuration

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
    }
}