Niri Animations

Pick a niri animation preset, tune the global animation speed, or switch animations off — from a Noctalia panel, instead of editing config by hand and reloading the compositor yourself.

Plugin

Field	Value
ID	imjustdoingmypart/niri-animations
Entries	Panels: picker (floating), docked (attached to the bar); shortcut: toggle

Requirements

• The niri command on PATH — used to reload the compositor config after a change.

• A niri config that includes the plugin's target file after your base animations. The plugin owns that file; point it at one dedicated to this, not at your config.kdl:

  include "./cfg/animation.kdl"   // your base / fallback animations
  // ...
  include "./animations.kdl"      // managed by this plugin, included last
  

• A folder of .kdl animation presets. Any file niri can include works; collections such as nirimation drop straight in.

Usage

Open the picker floating, or attached to the bar:

noctalia msg panel-toggle imjustdoingmypart/niri-animations:picker   # floating, centered
noctalia msg panel-toggle imjustdoingmypart/niri-animations:docked   # attached to the bar

Bind one of those to a key in your compositor. The Animations tile, added from Settings → Control Center → Shortcuts, opens the attached variant and stays highlighted while animations are enabled.

Both panel ids run the same script. They exist as separate entries because placement and position are host-owned — the host reads them from the manifest at load time, so a plugin cannot change its own placement at runtime and there is no user-facing key to override a plugin panel's placement. Shipping both variants is the only way to offer the choice.

In the panel:

• Preset — a dropdown of every .kdl in the presets directory, plus No preset (base pack), which drops the include and falls back to your base animations.
• Animations toggle — writes animations { off }.
• Speed — the global slowdown factor, 0.25×–3.00×. Above 1 is slower.
• Random — picks a random preset.

Every change is written and applied immediately; there is no Apply button.

Presets are listed by filename, deliberately. Preset headers carry a Desc: field, but it is free-form text written by each preset author — often just "imported from https://…" — and it gets worse with presets a user imported themselves. Surfacing it makes the plugin look broken when the problem is somebody else's metadata.

Settings

Setting	Type	Default	Description
presets_dir	string	~/.config/niri/animations	Folder scanned for .kdl presets. Non-.kdl files are ignored.
target_file	string	~/.config/niri/animations.kdl	File rewritten with the selection. Rewritten whole — treat it as owned by the plugin.
include_prefix	string	./animations	Path prefix written in the include line, relative to target_file.
reload_command	string	niri msg action load-config-file	Run after each write so the compositor picks up the change.

Notes

What the plugin writes. target_file gets an include line for the chosen preset and an animations block carrying the speed:

include "./animations/prism_fold.kdl"

animations {
    slowdown 1.50
}

off and slowdown are direct fields of animations, not subsections, which is why the speed applies on top of a preset that sets its own slowdown. niri's includes are positional and merge field by field, so a target file included last wins over the base animations. See Configuration: Animations and Configuration: Include.

Side effects.

Network	None.
Files read	presets_dir (directory listing) and target_file (to restore panel state on open).
Files written	target_file only. Nothing else on disk is modified.
Processes spawned	reload_command after each write, and noctalia msg panel-toggle … when the control-center tile is clicked.

Other compositors. The logic is compositor-agnostic — it writes an include line and runs a reload command — but the generated animations { } block is niri syntax, so only niri is supported today.

License

MIT