river

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

Note: river is currently early in development. Expect breaking changes and missing features. If you run into a bug don't hesitate to open an issue

Design goals

• Simplicity and minimalism, river should not overstep the bounds of a window manager.
• Window management based on a stack of views and tags.
• Dynamic layouts generated by external, user-written executables. (A default rivertile layout generator is provided.)
• Scriptable configuration and control through a custom wayland protocol and separate riverctl binary implementing it.

Building

On cloning the repository, you must init and update the submodules as well with e.g.

git submodule update --init

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

• zig 0.7.1
• wayland
• wayland-protocols
• wlroots 0.12.0
• xkbcommon
• libevdev
• pixman
• pkg-config
• scdoc (optional, but required for man page generation)

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

Then run, for example,

zig build -Drelease-safe=true --prefix /usr/local install

to build and install the binaries and man pages to /usr/local/bin and /usr/local/share/man. To enable experimental Xwayland support pass the -Dxwayland=true option as well.

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.

For a complete list of commands see the riverctl(1) man page.

Keyboard configuration is not yet implemented in river, but since river uses libxkbcommon you may use the following environment variables to set defaults:

• XKB_DEFAULT_RULES
• XKB_DEFAULT_MODEL
• XKB_DEFAULT_LAYOUT
• XKB_DEFAULT_VARIANT
• XKB_DEFAULT_OPTIONS

Possible values for these variables can be found in the xkeyboard-config(7) man page. For example, to use a dvorak layout one could start river with

XKB_DEFAULT_LAYOUT="us(dvorak)" river

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 us at #river on freenode. You should also read CONTRIBUTING.md if you intend to submit patches.

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).