Newly started applications receive focus, so they're visible by default. They are inserted right of the current view, so recovering the previous active pane is consistent ("left pane" keybinding, or the appropriate gesture).
Things on other desktops are invisible in every WM.
The only difference with niri is the possibility for things to be left or right of the current window. Overview helps with that, but I know what I expect to be on a specific desktop (it's related to the topic) and seldom need it.
Like imagine editor is on ws2, you open a terminal to /tmp/ to check something quick, it scrolls to the right, then jump to ws3 for your file manager and other stuff and go back to your editor.
Now you want to access that terminal on /tmp/ again. Where was it?
In i3, I just spam-switch workspaces in this case, but at least I can find them. With scrollable wms, every ws can potentially hold that target app.
It's right of your editor, where it started.
If you have (having had "Editor" focused, and just opened "TermT"):
(where pipe delimits a pane and parens are the active pane), if you go "next desktop" from "TermT" (the terminal at /tmp), that moves you down the stack of desktops. Moving up the stack of desktops returns with focus on "TermT". You'd then go "left pane" from "TermT" to get back to the editor.The answer (for me) is to think of desktops as topics. The terminal on /tmp is with the things that prompted its creation. If I needed to check some log output, for example, it's with the project that made that log output.
Edit: Note that there's nothing keeping you from stacking those terms if you like, i.e., the appropriate keybinding goes from the previous to
where the terms stack vertically in the ribbon of the desktop.I think they aren't referring to "where does it go?" and more being forgetful.
If you have something that would be reasonable to open on any workspace because it's ephemeral (they used a tmp terminal as an example), and you open it, navigate away from it, and then switch workspaces a few time, and then get pulled into a meeting or go to lunch, and come back, switch workspaces a few more times...
"Where did I leave that terminal, I dont remember where I was when I opened it."
In i3wm/sway etc, you can cycle all your workspaces and eventually one of them will have it visible. On Niri, as you cycle through all your workspaces you may never see it because you don't see all the windows in a workspace, unless you scroll through the workspace panes as you cycle workspaces.
It's not a problem necessarily, but it is something to consider. It sounds like this doesn't affect your workflow, but it might affect others.
It has overview. You can see all windows and workspaces in a scaled out view of your preference.
Fair enough. "Overview" [0] presumably solves this, though.
[0] https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/wiki/Overview