Niri Displays

Inspect connected outputs and make temporary display changes directly from Noctalia. The plugin uses Niri's IPC to expose resolution, refresh-rate, scale, and focused-output state.

Plugin

Field	Value
ID	raycursive/niri-displays
Entries	Bar widget: bar; panel: panel; service: displays

Requirements

• Noctalia plugin API 9 or newer (used for closure-backed display controls).
• The niri executable on PATH, with a running Niri session and NIRI_SOCKET available to Noctalia.
• A Niri version that supports the niri msg output IPC commands.

Usage

Enable raycursive/niri-displays in Settings → Plugins, then add the bar entry from Settings → Bar → Widgets. The displays service starts automatically, watches Noctalia's output-change hook, and uses slow polling as a recovery fallback.

Click the bar widget to open the panel entry. Each connected output shows its connector, make/model, focused state, current mode, refresh rate, and scale. Select a mode or refresh rate reported by Niri, or drag the scale slider, to apply a temporary change.

Open the panel without the bar widget with:

noctalia msg panel-toggle raycursive/niri-displays:panel

Scale presets

Each scale_presets item uses one of these forms:

WIDTHxHEIGHT=SCALE
PORT:WIDTHxHEIGHT=SCALE

For example:

3840x2160=1.5
2560x1440=1
DP-3:1920x1080=1.25

A port-specific preset wins over a global preset for the same resolution. At the same specificity, the last valid matching item wins. Presets match the resolution exactly and are applied after a resolution change, including changes detected outside the panel; refresh-rate-only changes do not reapply them.

Settings

Setting	Type	Default	Description
scale_presets	string_list	empty	Global or per-connector resolution=scale mappings applied after matching resolution changes.
refresh_interval	int	30 seconds	Recovery polling interval, limited to 5–300 seconds; normal output updates are event-driven.
glyph	glyph	device-desktop	Glyph used by this bar-widget instance.
show_resolution	bool	true	Shows the focused connector and resolution beside the bar glyph; disable for icon-only display.

IPC

The displays service accepts these events:

# Query Niri for a fresh output snapshot.
noctalia msg plugin raycursive/niri-displays:displays all refresh

# Write the normalized output snapshot to the Noctalia log.
noctalia msg plugin raycursive/niri-displays:displays all dump

Notes

• Discovery spawns niri msg --json outputs and niri msg --json focused-output. Changes spawn niri msg output <connector> mode ... or niri msg output <connector> scale ....
• Niri intentionally does not persist these IPC changes to config.kdl. A Niri restart or a later configuration reload can restore configured values; keep permanent defaults in your Niri configuration.
• A matching scale preset can change output scale automatically when the service starts, reloads, detects a resolution change, or receives a settings change.
• The plugin does not write files or make network requests. Command errors are shown without discarding the last successful in-memory output snapshot.