This was dropped from 200ms to 50ms in 4a65af66. However 50ms seems to be a bit too short in practice. I often hit ugly frame imperfection do to timeouts when toggling mpv between a small floating window and fullscreen for example, even on a relatively beefy desktop computer. This only happens while the video is playing in mpv, not while it is paused. I believe this is due to mpv ignoring the compositor's hints for when to render a new frame entirely while playing a video. It instead renders at the framerate of the video being played, even if the compositor requests a change in size. This isn't great but seems unlikely to change [1]. Overall, hitting 100ms timeouts subjectively doesn't feel anywhere near as sluggish as hitting 200ms timeouts and offers better frame perfection than 50ms timeouts in at least this one example, there are bound to be others. [1]: https://dudemanguy.github.io/blog/posts/2022-06-10-wayland-xorg/wayland-xorg.html
river
River is a dynamic tiling Wayland compositor with flexible runtime configuration.
Install from your package manager — Join us at #river on irc.libera.chat — Read our man pages and wiki
Note: river is currently early in development. Expect breaking changes and missing features. Bugs should however be rare at this point, if you run into one don't hesitate to open an issue
Design goals
- Simple and predictable behavior, river should be easy to use and have a low cognitive load.
- 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. The "development" versions are required if applicable to your distribution.
- zig 0.11
- wayland
- wayland-protocols
- wlroots 0.17.2
- xkbcommon
- libevdev
- pixman
- pkg-config
- scdoc (optional, but required for man page generation)
Then run, for example:
zig build -Doptimize=ReleaseSafe --prefix ~/.local install
To enable experimental Xwayland support pass the -Dxwayland
option as well.
If you are packaging river for distribution, see also PACKAGING.md.
Usage
River can either be run nested in an X11/Wayland session or directly
from a tty using KMS/DRM. Simply run the river
command.
On startup river will run an executable file at $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/river/init
if such an executable exists. If $XDG_CONFIG_HOME
is not set,
~/.config/river/init
will be used instead.
Usually this executable is a shell script invoking riverctl(1) to create mappings, start programs such as a layout generator or status bar, and perform other configuration.
An example init script with sane defaults is provided here in the example directory.
For complete documentation see the river(1)
, riverctl(1)
, and
rivertile(1)
man pages.
Licensing
River is released under the GNU General Public License v3.0 only.
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).