iRiS 0.2
iRiS is still under construction. Parts of it might look ass for now, and they get better every release. Point us at the worst ones on Discord.
2.32.0 turns iRiS into a desktop you shape by touching it: click the Island, the Dock, a bubble or a widget and its options grow right there, widgets stack and read the wallpaper under them, the Control Center and the lock screen are yours to arrange, Orbit lays your whole session out from the Island, and the shell and your apps switch together between dark, ink and light.
The same desktop in the Light scheme: widgets turn to dark ink where the wallpaper is bright
Added
- Customize where you look: click the Island, the Dock, a bubble or a piece and its options grow out of it, with Themes, Look, Pieces, undo and Done on the Island and a ring that follows the shape you are editing. Prefer one panel? Studio keeps every area in a column beside the screen (Settings › Appearance › Customize opens). Right-click the desktop › Customize iRiS, or
inir iris edit. - Dark, Ink and Light: Scheme in Appearance follows the system or stays where you put it. Ink is washi and sumi, softer than white, and each scheme has its own tone, colour strength and frost. The scheme is the system's mode, so GTK, Qt, terminals and VS Code switch with the shell (
inir colorMode set dark|light|toggle). - Colour themes for the shell and your apps: Catppuccin, Nord, Rosé Pine, Tokyo Night, iRiS Ink and more instead of the wallpaper's palette, and Match the shell lends iRiS the theme's accent and material (
inir iris palette catppuccin-mocha). - Menu bar layout: a thin strip with your workspaces, the focused window and your pieces, clear over the wallpaper (its items turn dark over a light one) or on a band, with the Island hanging from it as a notch that grows into whatever it opens (
inir iris layout menubar). - Island and Dock shapes: capsule, round, squircle or square, the open Island follows, and one switch gives both the bubbles' shape (Settings › Appearance › Shape).
- Six new themes: Twilight and Daybreak over a clear menu bar, Horizon with one black band across the top, Lume with clear glass and iNstrument widgets, and the anime themes Magical Girl and Spirit Forest.
- Widget stacks: drop one desktop widget on another while arranging, or pick Stack with, and they share one place, turning by themselves, with the wheel or from the dots on their edge. Order, interval, taking a widget out and splitting the stack are in its quick controls (
inir widgetStacks). - One design for every widget: iRiS, Material, iNstrument or Readout from Settings or any widget's Look page, with Match for the ones that kept their own look and Undo for your old mix. iNstrument now covers music, Screen Time and Controls.
- Widgets that read the wallpaper under them: over a bright spot a widget turns to dark ink and deeper accents and its glass turns to frost, following it as you drag. Accents come from the wallpaper, iRiS, Spectrum or Mono with a strength you pick once, and Lume on every widget backs every text anyway.
- A widget bar that finds things: Ctrl+F or the magnifier searches by name or by what a widget does, typos forgiven; arrows, Enter and Escape work as you expect, and the arrow keys nudge the selected widget. Its quick controls are one sheet with Widget, Look, Arrange and Stack pages.
- A Control Center you arrange: drag, resize from a corner and add from a library with all 20 quick toggles, or start from six layouts. Right-click a display or system control to unfold brightness, Night Light warmth and schedule, dark mode, Do Not Disturb, Game mode, Stay awake and the power profile (
inir iris control edit). - A lock screen you design on the real lock: move the clock, the player and the sign-in field, start from four layouts, choose what plays behind them (video included) and give each lock widget its own design, material, corners and opacity (
inir iris lock edit). - Spotlight searches the whole shell: widgets, shell actions and every option by area, with typos, initials and short words forgiven;
/lists iRiS's switches and themes and flips them in place, and the clipboard scrolls through its whole history. - Orbit: the Island grows into your session: the workspace you are on as a strip of its windows, each a picture where Niri keeps it, with its neighbours in miniature above and below and a rail naming each by its number. Type to light up where a window is and ↵ goes to it; the window you pick lists its actions under its workspace, and Recent and set-aside windows sit below. It starts off while it matures: turn it on in Settings › Orbit, then open it from a hot corner that picks a free one itself or bind
inir orbit toggle. - Keybinds in one line:
inir bind Mod+O orbit togglechecks the call and tells you what those keys do now;--addsaves it to your own Niri file, where it wins over iNiR's default, and--exampleslists ready binds for your family. Tab completion in bash, zsh and fish knows every target, function and the values each one takes, and installs itself (inir completions install). In iRiS,inir iris focus,todayandcontrolCenteropen the side panels and the Control Center by their names. - iRiS Settings for the whole desktop: date and time, language, notifications and quiet hours, sounds, night light, battery, game mode, idle, screenshots and a Sources section for weather, calendars and updates, plus native pages for Niri's windows, keyboard, mouse and displays. Lay it out as a sidebar, a rail or a home.
- Every surface on its own terms: each iRiS surface can be solid or glass and move in its own style, cards come in four designs, the Island can auto-hide, pieces can sit before the clock, and six pieces let you choose their icon.
- A visualizer wherever music plays: capsules, a rising equalizer, dots, a wave or a ring on the resting Island, its player page and a new Visualizer bubble, with bands and colour in Now Playing.
- New pieces: VPN for NetworkManager and Tailscale (addresses, your tailnet's devices, live traffic, WireGuard and OpenVPN import,
inir vpn), Airing counting down to the next episode from AniList, Continue to search, play and resume anime in mpv to the second with its subtitles at hand, and a bubble that shows what changed in a new iNiR version and updates from its card. - Connection notices in every family: mice, keyboards, controllers, phones, drives and SD cards by name, plus Bluetooth, the charger, displays, sound output and the internet (
inir connections sample usb). - Niri from Settings: six window animation presets (Snappy, Niri, Material, Bouncy, Gentle, Instant) in every family, and window opacity and blur rules without editing KDL (
inir niriAnimations apply snappy). - Wallpaper gallery sources and filters: stills, live wallpapers or GIFs only, Konachan and yande.re beside Wallhaven, and sorting with a range for Wallhaven's top picks.
- A family switch list: choose which families Super+Shift+W cycles through, in any family's Settings.
- Your avatar in the Material bar: your picture can be the top-left icon.
Changed
- Live wallpapers play from a copy sized to your screen and glass shares one small decoder: 1.8 GB became under 700 MB with a 4K wallpaper, and pausing holds the frame instead of rewinding.
- The desktop stops drawing when nobody can see it: music visuals, the system monitor and the Organic edge hold still behind windows, and idle GPU use went from 22 % to 9 %.
- The shell hands freed memory back to the system (about 290 MB with a live wallpaper) and no longer starts Mesa's extra GL threads.
- Live wallpapers download in 4K when MotionBgs has it; Light keeps HD for slower machines.
- Snappy is the default Niri animation on fresh installs, so windows open in about half the time.
- iRiS ships its own type (Inter, Inter Display and Rubik) with a weight setting.
- Glass catches light on its cut edge, so it no longer vanishes over a desktop darkened by windows, and compositor blur follows iRiS's real shape.
- Dock previews show the app's icon and a strip of its workspace's columns with its window lit; middle-click one to close it.
- The iRiS desktop menu is yours to arrange (screenshot, terminal, files, colour picker, next wallpaper and more).
- Themes dress the lock screen and the Control Center too, and a theme can lend only its colours.
- You decide what the iRiS OSD shows, in fullscreen too, and the volume limit goes up to 153 %.
- Online features (wallpaper sources, news, anime, weather, lyrics, AI chat) say when you are offline and pick up again on their own; weather keeps its last forecast.
- iRiS Settings reads better on glass: groups open on what people look for first, search reads descriptions and marks the words you typed, and the section you are in wears the accent.
- A fresh iRiS install keeps the wallpaper clear of Material's blur and dim, and cards leave a little air between themselves and the bubble that opened them.
- The music widget rests as a single tile when nothing plays, and the media card's artwork fills the card.
- The installer says when a distribution's Qt is older than 6.9 instead of failing halfway, and a first install ends by saying why to reboot.
Fixed
- YouTube previews no longer take over what is playing, and apps that play through mpv or GStreamer show their own name in the sound lists.
- Track time and length stay right after seeks and ads in every family, and artwork no longer flickers between tracks.
- Light mode keeps its contrast: accents are solved against the surface they sit on, text on accent fills is readable, and VS Code gets a real light theme.
- Auto light or dark reads the wallpaper you actually see (PNGs with an alpha channel turned the shell light on 56 of 265 wallpapers here), and a mode you pick by hand stays.
- The shell starts without recolouring every app, and apps under frost or blur take the material the shell actually shows.
- iRiS loads again on Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora, whose Qt still reserved four names it used.
- Repeating calendar events show every time they repeat, and external calendars no longer empty out after a sync without internet.
- Fullscreen is noticed every time, so the bar hides and game mode starts on a second fullscreen window, and the next song no longer pops up over a game.
- Screen corners open on their own monitor, and Material sidebars open on the monitor you clicked.
- A crowded Material bar no longer cuts its modules in half; the music title gives way first.
- Transparent widgets are bare instead of sitting on a faint dark plate.
- Bare desktop widgets on a light scheme keep light ink over a dark wallpaper instead of turning near black, and a soft shadow holds their text where the wallpaper under them is bright.
- The keybind examples in the IPC reference use Niri's own syntax, so they can be pasted into your config.
- Icon themes follow the light or dark scheme: WhiteSur-dark's white folders no longer show up in Nautilus, Dolphin or the tray on a light scheme.
- Live wallpapers no longer restart when you uncover the desktop, and switching families no longer shows a pixelated frame.
- Big wallpaper folders no longer choke the shell (3736 processes became 31 for a 300-image folder), folders with spaces get thumbnails, and a file name can no longer run a command.
- Done and the other edit-mode buttons answer the first click, locking and unlocking iRiS no longer flash, and lock-screen widgets show up.
- Tray icons show the icon the app publishes, and Island bubbles no longer contact AniList unless you placed Airing.
- Your language shows outside the one region it was written for, language names read the same in every picker, and Spotlight's usage hints keep the command you type.
- Setup leaves your font settings alone, and
inir updatenames the checkout it updates, shows the real pull error and stops flagging our own files as your changes. - Niri window rules stay scoped to iNiR's own and keep the game mode marker.
Issues / PRs
Contributors
Thanks to @cnvuls for the Material animation preset and the idea behind the presets, to @Azhar457 for the Indonesian translation, to jen9 on Discord for the idea behind widget stacks, and to @Itstatertots, @kayliox, @Angel173hu and @noxygalaxy for the reports behind the fixes.
Update: https://github.com/snowarch/iNiR/wiki/SETUP#update
Fresh install: https://github.com/snowarch/iNiR/wiki/INSTALL
Full changelog: https://github.com/snowarch/iNiR/blob/v2.32.0/CHANGELOG.md#2320---2026-09-29