niri-workspaces-rs

A fast, event-driven workspace indicator for Waybar and niri.

Features

Visual bars instead of numbers — each window is rendered as a colored bar.
Event-driven daemon mode — keeps a persistent niri socket connection and emits JSON updates only when workspace/window state changes.
App-aware coloring — built-in colors for Chrome (red), Firefox, Discord/Vesktop, Spotify, Todoist, Gmail, and terminals.
Terminal app detection via /proc — detects jcode, Claude, Codex, and Neovim/Vim running inside terminal windows.
Terminal support — works with Alacritty, Kitty, Ghostty, Foot, and Footclient.
Focus semantics — uses █ for the focused window, ▌ for the active window on an unfocused workspace, and | for other windows.
tmux hinting — uses ¦ for non-focused tmux windows.
Cleaner empty workspace handling — unfocused empty workspaces are hidden; a focused empty workspace is shown as a dim ·.
Named workspace support — shows the custom workspace name when that workspace is focused; tooltips include only non-empty workspaces.
Safer terminal PID detection — skips /proc descendant inference for shared terminal PIDs in cases that can otherwise cause false positives.

The daemon is ~10-12x faster than the signal-based approach and ~300x faster than the original bash script.

cargo build --release
cp target/release/niri-workspaces ~/.config/waybar/

If Waybar is already running, restart Waybar or reload the module so the new binary is picked up.

"custom/workspaces": {
    "exec": "~/.config/waybar/niri-workspaces",
    "return-type": "json",
    "format": "{}"
}

No interval or signal is needed — the daemon outputs JSON whenever relevant niri events occur.

MIT