GLOBAL_ACTIONS

Global Actions

Global actions are keyboard-driven commands you can trigger from the Overview search bar or bind to keys. They're the shell's equivalent of a command palette.

Using actions

Open Overview (Super+Space) and start typing. Actions appear alongside app results. They're prefixed with their category:

• > for shell actions (toggle sidebar, switch family, open settings)
• = for calculator (evaluates math expressions via qalc)
• $ for system actions (lock, logout, reboot)

You can also bind any action directly to a keybind through Niri's config.

Built-in actions

Shell

Action	What it does
Toggle sidebar left	Open/close the left sidebar
Toggle sidebar right	Open/close the right sidebar
Toggle overview	Open/close workspace overview
Switch panel family	Swap between ii and waffle
Open settings	Launch the settings UI
Reload shell	Hot-reload the shell

System

Action	What it does
Lock	Lock the session
Logout	Show session screen
Reboot	Reboot (with confirmation)
Shutdown	Shutdown (with confirmation)
Suspend	Suspend the system

Tools

Action	What it does
Screenshot region	Select a region to screenshot
Screen record	Start/stop screen recording
OCR region	Select a region for text recognition
Color picker	Pick a color from screen
Clipboard history	Open clipboard manager

Setup recipes

Type /setup in the launcher to see every available installer. Each entry runs a dedicated, distro-aware script in your terminal and pushes progress notifications to the desktop.

Action	What it does
/setup-spotify	Installs Spotify (AUR on Arch, Flatpak elsewhere) and configures Spicetify with the Marketplace plugin

Recipes live under scripts/setup/ and are auto-discovered. Adding one is a pure filesystem operation, no QML edits and no shell reload required. The full maintainer guide is in scripts/setup/README.md. The short version:

1. cp scripts/setup/_template.sh.example scripts/setup/<slug>.sh and fill in the @meta header + body.
2. chmod +x scripts/setup/<slug>.sh.

The action id (/setup-<slug>), display name, icon, keywords, terminal launching and the in-place progress notifications are all derived automatically. A FolderListModel + a single awk subprocess handle discovery; only the affected setup action recomputes when a recipe is added/changed.

You can disable the whole category by setting search.globalActions.enableSetup to false in your config.

Custom actions

You can add your own actions by creating scripts in:

~/.config/illogical-impulse/actions/

Each script becomes an action that appears in Overview search. The filename becomes the action name (without extension).

Example: create ~/.config/illogical-impulse/actions/deploy.sh:

#!/bin/bash
cd ~/myproject && make deploy
notify-send "Deployed" "Project deployed successfully"

The action "deploy" will now appear when you search for it in Overview.

IPC

inir globalActions list              # list all available actions
inir globalActions search "screen"   # search actions by name
inir globalActions run <id>          # execute an action by ID
inir globalActions runWithArgs <id> <args>  # execute with extra arguments