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Comment by evgpbfhnr | Hacker News Reader

My only complain about niri is that after a few weeks without reboot I end up with ~500 terms open, as I often open a new shell to check something, get distracted, and forget about it as it scrolls out of the view... (I usually notice at the 400-500 mark because this machine starts swapping noticeably, and closing it all is a chore that usually ends in pkill without checking...)

Maybe a bit more self discipline would help :)

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Wouldn't you have the same problem with changing workspaces? Sounds like you can't keep track of anything not currently present on the screen, which before the overview was a lot harder to deal with. One thing that could help is to create a "temporary terminal" keybinding to launch in floating mode so you'll never forget to close it. Or create a focus-or-launch bind that switches to an existing terminal (tools like Nirius can help minimize scripting). The other thing that may help is adjusting your struts so you can see that windows exist to the left or the right. More of general workflow tip than one related to just terminals.

Yes and no; the difference with workspace is that I was limited to 0-9 with my old wm, so at some point I'd just run out of space and had to close some windows. (well, that, and X11 is apparently limited to 256 clients by default and I never changed that; but I rarely hit that limit :P)

I do have some struts on the side, but I'm basically always juggling with at least 4 or 5 tasks so I always have things open; (I'm not using any right now but I do like the "quake terminals" temporary term styles... But for the same reason it's not always appropriate -- if I didn't close the term, it's because I wasn't done with it and mean to get back to it...)

I started using niri before the overview, I think that could help if I get used to it. But better than overview, what I'd want is something always visible like some horizontal scrollbar indicator to remind me there's e.g. more than 3 windows hidden or something. That might be possible to do with waybar and a bit of glue parsing the windows list...

The latest release exposes information about windows list and positions via API. Someone can write a widget for waybar or any other bar.

Oh! That didn't exist a few months ago, I need to update and do this then :D

I don't use niri but I worked around this problem (feature?) by creating a bash script that by default checks if a terminal is already open and if so, brings it into focus. Then I attach it to my default shortcut to open terminal and then create one more shortcut that opens a new terminal every time. So now, depending on which shortcut is pressed, I can either keep reusing the existing terminal or open a new one. I'm sure we can have a script that can do more fancy logic like allowing new terminals upto a given number and after that just bring the latest one into focus. Plenty of possibilities.

I have a script that allows searching for windows based on title; so e.g. if I know I had a shell open in directory X I could search for that and jump to it... But in practice I quickly have 5+ shells in a directory once I start working on something and at this point my script doesn't let me differentiate between these easily enough to be useful.

Hmm, perhaps that could be made more interactive and allow cycling through these without closing the search overlay... I'll give that a try! :)

I guess you could do this:

    echo "TMOUT=$(units -t '7 days' seconds)" >> .bashrc

If a shell has been sitting at the prompt for 7 days with no input, it's probably OK for it to close. I'm sure it'll be wrong sometimes, but it seems less bad than pkill en masse.

that is actually dream come true... let's keep everything open always :)

and then you reboot the machine with full session restore working (whenever that's available for wayland) and get 500 terminal windows opening at the same time :)

This is what we all want, to be in control. I am OK to make a mess sometimes as long as it is my mess not because of magical system. So yeah I would be OK.

Some kind of alert task that would tell you you have window open that you didn't visit in days would probably also be useful to your point.

I am not against it, just I can see positives in this. This is like tmux without tmux.

Oh, i actually agree with you, I was more concerned about the suprise abd amusement of seeing that amount of windows pop up out of nowhere. Though, I do wonder how well a linux computer will deal with so much forking, if it freezes the machine for a minute it would be rather bad, but maybe linux and wayland are mature enough to not freeze and spawn all that in like a second or so

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