peck

Vimium-style mouseless navigation for Niri.

Important

This is experimental software. Expect things to break.

Prerequisites

Niri version

As of writing, Niri does not expose the absolute coordinates of tiled windows, which would make the overlay positioning impossible. The currently open pull request ipc: expose workspace scrolling view position makes deriving the absolute coordinates of tiled windows possible via the new scrolling_view_pos field in the IPC protocol.

If you are on NixOS, you can switch to this fork using the following override:

pkgs.niri.overrideAttrs (_: {
  src = pkgs.fetchFromGitHub {
    owner = "kiryl";
    repo = "niri";
    rev = "d26ab5f29df670110a91a7e933a743eeaf611978";
    hash = "sha256-3HxntJA2DNg+L94gbM86uGeJqPPWbSX88CjteOmYV0o=";
  };
});

Accessibility

In order for this application to work, at-spi2-core needs to be running. On NixOS, you can enable it using the following configuration:

services.gnome.at-spi2-core.enable = true;

With the bus running, some apps still need to be told to export their accessibility trees:

dconf.settings."org/gnome/desktop/interface".toolkit-accessibility = true;

Usage

peck daemon runs a persistent background process. peck activate triggers a single activation against the currently focused window. Run the daemon at startup and bind activate to your preferred keybind in your Niri config:

spawn-at-startup "peck" "daemon"

binds {
    Mod+Shift+Space { spawn "peck" "activate"; }
}

The --mode flag can be used to specify the action that should be taken on selection. This includes:

• panel (default)
• left_click
• right_click
• double_click
• middle_click
• warp

panel mode is the default and provides a fuzzy-searchable view of accessible elements. Other modes provide the hints interface without the fuzzy search.

Inspiration / Related Work

• ShortCat (proprietary, MacOS only)
• Hints