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

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

Then run, for example, sudo zig build --prefix /usr/local install to build and install the river and riverctl binaries to /usr/local/bin. To enable experimental Xwayland support pass the -Dxwayland=true option.

Usage

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

River has no keybindings by default; mappings can be created using the map command of riverctl. Generally, creating mappings and other configuration is done with a shell script. River will execute any arbitrary shell command passed with the -c flag during startup. For example:

river -c /path/to/config.sh

An example script with sane defaults is provided here in the contrib directory.

Some configuration options are still hardcoded in config.zig. Eventually all configuration will be moved to the riverctl binary.

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).