river

river is a dynamic wayland compositor that takes inspiration from dwm and bspwm.

Note: river is currently early in development and may lack some features. If there are specific features blocking you from using river, don't hesitate to open an issue

Design goals

• Simplicity and minimalism, river should not overstep the bounds of a window manger.
• Dynamic window management based on a stack of views and tags like dwm.
• Scriptable configuration and control through a separate binary, riverctl, like bspwm. This works using the custom river-control protocol.

Building

To compile river first ensure that you have the following dependencies installed:

• zig 0.6.0
• wayland
• wayland-protocols
• wlroots 0.10.1
• xkbcommon
• pixman
• pkg-config

Then simply use zig build to build and zig build run to run. This will also build riverctl which can be found at zig-cache/bin/riverctl. To enable experimental Xwayland support use -Dxwayland=true.

Note: NixOS users should refer to the Building on NixOS wiki page

River can either be run nested in an X11/wayland session or directly from a tty using KMS/DRM.

Keybinds are similar to the defaults of dwm, but using the "logo key" instead of alt. Check out the comments in config.zig for a complete list of bindings. Note that the terminal emulator is currently hardcoded to alacritty but may be changed by editing config.zig and recompiling.

Development

Check out the roadmap if you'd like to see what has been done and what is left to do.

If you are interested in the development of river, please join our matrix channel: #river:matrix.org. You should also read CONTRIBUTING.md if you intend to submit patches.

I can often be found in the #sway-devel IRC channel with the nick ifreund on irc.freenode.net as well, or reached by email at ifreund@ifreund.xyz.

Licensing

river is released under the GNU General Public License version 3, or (at your option) any later version.

The protocols in the protocol directory are released under various licenses by various parties. You should refer to the copyright block of each protocol for the licensing information. The protocols prefixed with river and developed by this project are released under the ISC license (as stated in their copyright blocks).