What's New Since 0.7.0
Overview has been rebuilt around your desktop. OmniWM 0.7.1 brings a major overhaul to how you see, find, and organize your windows: spacious wallpaper ribbons, a separate view for each display, search that reaches inside tabbed columns and groups, and much richer mouse and keyboard controls. Your window arrangements stay recognizable as you move through even your busiest workspaces.
A new Overview
- Workspace ribbons that preserve your layout. Each display now shows its own workspaces at a consistent scale, so a wide Niri workspace no longer shrinks all its windows to fit. Ribbons preserve window proportions, horizontal and vertical layouts, and Dwindle's spatial arrangement. Wallpaper extends with tiled content, while native dark glass and focus borders bring the view together.
- Find windows inside tabs and groups. Search by app name or window title, including inactive Niri tabs and Dwindle group members. Each group keeps one preview card with arrows and a title picker, so you can browse its windows without losing the surrounding layout. Small Dwindle tiles use compact controls. Result counts, a clear no-results message, and a Clear button make searching easier to follow.
- Create and organize workspaces in place. Empty workspaces are visible and keyboard-selectable. Click the trailing +, select it and press Return, or drop a window onto it to create a workspace. Drag windows between ribbons or onto another display, with destination labels and edge scrolling to guide the move. Floating windows keep their size when dropped.
- Keep your place while rearranging. Workspace pans survive structural edits, including Niri consume and expel operations. Cards animate into their new positions, and mouse-wheel scrolling, overflow paging, and keyboard selection reveals use Overview's spring motion. Trackpad scrolling and direct dragging remain immediate.
- New input preferences. In Settings → Overview, assign a middle or extra mouse button to toggle Overview, adjust mouse-wheel speed from 5% to 200%, or invert scrolling direction. Mouse-button activation is unassigned by default, and buttons used by System Hyper cannot also toggle Overview. Wheel-speed adjustments leave trackpad speed unchanged.
- Previews that are ready when you return. Overview prioritizes the selected window and remembers recently visible previews at full quality within a 128 MiB cache budget after closing. Cached previews appear immediately; the first live image gently fades into an empty card. Saved Niri columns and Dwindle groups also appear correctly on the first opening after launch, without visiting each workspace first. Motion continues to respect your animation preference and macOS Reduce Motion.
Fixes and project updates
- Fix blocked Niri window moves. Small differences between a requested size and the size an app accepts no longer become hard minimums that can incorrectly prevent left/right window transfers. This addresses the captured case where a full-height window on a secondary display could not move into a smaller stack. (#709)
- OmniWM now lives under OmniNull. App links, update checks, documentation, and release tooling point to OmniNull/OmniWM.
Breaking changes and upgrading from 0.7.0
No configuration migration or script changes are required. Configuration stays at schema 3, IPC stays at protocol 15, and existing commands and default shortcuts retain their contracts. The new Overview settings are optional.
There are intentional changes to Overview's interaction and appearance:
- Navigation stops at the ends. Arrows, configured focus shortcuts, Tab/Shift-Tab, and tab-preview arrows no longer wrap around. Ordinary keyboard traversal also includes empty workspaces and the + target; search traversal stays within matching windows on the current display.
- Each display shows its own workspaces. To move a window between displays, drag it onto the destination display's Overview panel.
- Zoom is remembered. Zoom changes made inside Overview are saved when it closes, rather than resetting on the next opening.
- The selected border follows your desktop focus border by default. To keep using a separate Overview selected-window color, turn off Settings → Overview → Selected Border Matches Focus Border. Existing saved colors and backdrop opacity are preserved.
If you edit settings.toml by hand, the new optional overview.mouseButton accepts raw button numbers 2–5 and cannot use the same button as System Hyper. An invalid assignment rejects the configuration file: at launch OmniWM uses defaults; during a running session the last accepted settings stay active. Leaving it unset preserves existing mouse-button behavior.
Thanks
Thank you to everyone contributing to and supporting OmniWM. The contributor credits now include Matt Petters for the Quake Terminal hyperlink support shipped in 0.7.0, and we welcome cafe3310 to the sponsor list.
Full changelog: v0.7.0…v0.7.1