Ciri

Introduction

Ciri provides a flake with home manager options to configure the niri compositor. Allowing you to configure niri in nix directly.

Goals

The main motivation for this project is to automatically generate nix configuration options from the niri source code, removing the need to implement and review every change to the niri configuration options manually.

Ciri aims to:

  • automatically detect changes to the niri configuration options and generate nix options directly from the upstream repo
  • quickly deliver updates for the nix options (see the type updates section)
  • mirror the upstream options and configuration structure as closely as possible
  • provide an intuitive and easy configuration experience

Type updates

The nix types are generated at types.nix by a rust script. Currently, updates to the niri configuration are polled once a week by this github action. This means that the options should never be more than a week out of date. The frequency of these checks is up for discussion. The rationale for the current choice is that the niri configration options are not updated that frequently, so polling for updates any quicker will just be wasting compute. The job can be triggered manually, so if you desperately need the updates feel free to create an issue.

The options on the main branch currently targets the main branch of niri. Ciri is capable of targetting stable releases as well, but there are some known limitations that make this suboptimal for now.

Known limitations

The ciri flake needs to convert the nix configuration options to the niri KDL configuration. The nix to KDL translation is on a best effort basis, we try to provide reasonable defaults, but for more complex KDL structures it becomes harder to handle. There are bound to be edge cases that aren't handled since Nix attrsets doesn't map to KDL nicely.

In general, options with primitive types such as bool, int, or str will probably be handled correctly, but there are bound to be some unhandled edge cases. If you encounter any issues with the generated KDL feel free to file an issue or open a PR to fix it.