Niri Float Sticky

A utility to make floating windows visible across all workspaces in niri — similar to "sticky windows" in other compositors.

Why?

Niri doesn’t natively support global floating windows. This tool forces float windows to persist on every workspace, mimicking the sticky behavior from X11/Wayland compositors like Sway or KWin.

Installation

Via Go:

go install github.com/probeldev/niri-float-sticky@latest

Via AUR (maintained by jamlotrasoiaf/brainworms2002):

paru -S niri-float-sticky

Via Nix:

nix profile install github:probeldev/niri-float-sticky 

Usage

To automatically launch the utility on niri startup, add this line to your niri configuration:

spawn-at-startup "niri-float-sticky"

Command Line Options

Usage of niri-float-sticky:
  -allow-moving-to-foreign-monitors
        allow moving to foreign monitors
  -app-id value
        only move floating windows with app-id matching given patterns
  -debug
        enable debug logging
  -disable-auto-stick
        disable auto sticking for all windows
  -ipc string
        send IPC command to daemon: set_sticky, unset_sticky, toggle_sticky
  -title value
        only move floating windows with title matching this pattern
  -version
        print version and exit

Notes:

• -app-id and -title can be provided multiple times to specify different patterns.
• Each flag accepts regex, so you can also provide multiple patterns in one flag (e.g. foo|bar).
• Internally all patterns are combined into a single regex with alternatives

Example with debug log:

niri-float-sticky -debug >> /tmp/niri-float-sticky.log

# Configuring logrotate
cat <<EOF | sudo tee /etc/logrotate.d/niri-float-sticky >/dev/null
/tmp/niri-float-sticky.log {
    daily
    rotate 5
    compress
    missingok
    notifempty
    copytruncate
    maxsize 10M
    su root root
}
EOF

IPC

niri-float-sticky exposes a simple UNIX socket IPC interface to control window stickiness at runtime.

The daemon creates a socket at:

$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/niri-float-sticky.sock

This allows external commands (for example, keybindings) to toggle stickiness of the currently focused window.

How It Works

The binary has two modes:

1. Daemon mode (default) Runs the event loop and listens for IPC commands.

2. Client mode (-ipc) Sends a command to the running daemon and exits immediately.

Available IPC Commands

niri-float-sticky -ipc set_sticky
niri-float-sticky -ipc unset_sticky
niri-float-sticky -ipc toggle_sticky

• set_sticky — force window to be sticky
• unset_sticky — remove manual override
• toggle_sticky — toggle sticky state

Example: Keybinding in niri

You can bind stickiness toggling to a key:

binds {
    Mod+G { 
        spawn "niri-float-sticky" "-ipc" "toggle_sticky"; 
    }
}

Implementation Details

The IPC protocol uses a JSON message over a UNIX domain socket:

{
  "action": "toggle_sticky",
  "window_id": 123456
}

Contributing

We welcome all contributions! To get started:

1. Open an Issue to:

   • Report bugs
   • Suggest new features
   • Ask questions

2. Create a Pull Request for:

   • Bug fixes
   • New functionality
   • Documentation improvements

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.