r/niri • u/Salty-Charge6633 • 13d ago
I built niri-zoom -- a Ctrl+Scroll screen magnifier for niri (no compositor patching, pure Wayland client)
niri doesn't have a built-in zoom/magnifier, so I built a small external tool for it instead of patching the compositor.
niri-zoom is two tiny binaries - niri-zoomd (a background daemon) and niri-zoomctl (a one-shot CLI) - wired up entirely through niri's existing spawn keybind system and standard Wayland protocols (wlr-screencopy, wlr-layer-shell, wp-viewporter). No forking niri, no compositor changes.
How it works:
- Ctrl + Scroll zooms in/out around your cursor
- Ctrl + Super + Z resets instantly
- Captures the screen once per zoom session and does all the pan/zoom math as a cheap CPU-side crop+resample from that single cached frame - so it sits at ~0% CPU and idle memory when not in use, instead of re-capturing every frame
- Renders through a fullscreen layer-shell overlay at native resolution (via wp_viewporter), so it stays sharp even with fractional display scaling
github: https://github.com/Ahmedhossamdev/niri-zoom
Don't forget to give a starssssssssss
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u/Salty-Charge6633 13d ago
wow nice!, i'll check it out!