Add a command to list all the loaded config files

[Nikitf777]

Add a command like niri msg config-files or niri msg configs to list the hierarchy of the loaded config files.
This will be useful for the tools that edit niri config files, like DankMaterialShell or nirimod.
Currently, such tools have to guess whether the specific config files are used or which files are used. For example, my /etc/niri/config.kdl currently has the following lines:

include optional=true "~/.config/niri/dms/alttab.kdl"
include optional=true "~/.config/niri/dms/binds.kdl"
include optional=true "~/.config/niri/dms/colors.kdl"
include optional=true "~/.config/niri/dms/cursor.kdl"
include optional=true "~/.config/niri/dms/layout.kdl"
include optional=true "~/.config/niri/dms/outputs.kdl"
include optional=true "~/.config/niri/dms/windowrules.kdl"
include optional=true "~/.config/niri/dms/wpblur.kdl"

So, all the DMS files are included. But DMS shows a warning that these files are not included, because it doesn't know that they actually are. And it has no reliable way to find it out, because niri can be launched with a custom config file path.

[nickjj]

In case this doesn't get implemented you can run grep "^include " ~/.config/niri/config.kdl to find all non-commented out included configs in your main config.

I use something similar in a custom Walker menu that gets a full list of key binds across all of your configs in the original order you have them defined.

If the paths are important you can either parse them out of that result or use a different strategy like find -L ~/.config/niri -name "*.kdl*" to get all of the kdl files, but this won't preserve their include order or know if they are used or not. You could combine both approaches to cross reference them and get a final answer but that's more than a 1 liner.

[Nikitf777]

And this is exactly what DankMaterialShell does, and that's why it thinks that its config files are not included on my system, while they actually are.

[nickjj]

Oh, is it because you use /etc/niri with a custom config path? Maybe you can symlink that to ~/.config/niri for a quick fix, but I do see what you mean, if you use --config then it can be anywhere so tools can't be expected to find it anywhere.

Turns out you can run niri validate from the command line and it will provide which config is loaded, on my machine it shows 2026-05-09T15:55:25.706485Z DEBUG niri_config: loaded config from "/home/nick/.config/niri/config.kdl".

I don't use DMS but since it's a general purpose tool, maybe you can report a feature request there in the meantime because IMO using that as a source of truth seems more robust than assuming ~/.config/niri.

Edit:

Also the docs say you can set a custom config with NIRI_CONFIG instead of --config. I looked through DMS' source code on GitHub and didn't see any references to that so it wouldn't help here but probably is worth supporting at the DMS level if you opened a feature request there.

[Nikitf777]

/etc/niri/config.kdl of actually a standard config path. So DMS could be patched to check it as well. But it's just a workaround. What if the DMS files are included indirectly (in a file that is included in /etc/niri/config.kdl)? Or, as I mentioned, a custom config path is used? The only reliable solution is to add a new IPC command.