dwl is a compact, hackable compositor for Wayland based on wlroots.
It is intended to fill the same space in the Wayland world that dwm does in X11, primarily in terms of philosophy, and secondarily in terms of functionality.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Any features provided by dwm/Xlib: simple window borders, tags, keybindings, client rules, mouse move/resize. Providing a built-in status bar is an exception to this goal, to avoid dependencies on font rendering and/or drawing libraries when an external bar could work well.
- Configurable multi-monitor layout support, including position and rotation.
- Configurable HiDPI/multi-DPI support.
- Idle-inhibit protocol which lets applications such as mpv disable idle monitoring.
- Provide information to external status bars via stdout/stdin.
- Urgency hints via xdg-activate protocol.
- Support screen lockers via input-inhibitor protocol.
- Various Wayland protocols.
- XWayland support as provided by wlroots (can be enabled in config.mk).
- Zero flickering – Wayland users naturally expect that “every frame is perfect”.
- Layer shell popups (used by Waybar).
- Damage tracking provided by scenegraph API.
Website: codeberg.org/dwl/dwl
Support:
Developer: dwl team
License: GNU General Public License 3.0
dwl is written in C. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Tiling Wayland Compositors | |
|---|---|
| Sway | i3-compatible tiling Wayland compositor and a replacement for i3 |
| niri | Scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor |
| Hyprland | Dynamic tiling Wayland compositor based on wlroots |
| Qtile | Full-featured, hackable tiling window manager |
| Swayfx | Sway with eye candy |
| river | Compositor with flexible runtime configuration. |
| MangoWC | Lightweight yet a good set of features |
| dwl | dwm for Wayland |
| fht-compositor | Dynamic tiling Wayland compositor |
| newm-atha | Wayland compositor written with laptops and touchpads in mind |
| Cagebreak | Seeks inspiration from Ratpoison |
| Mahogany | Modeled after StumpWM |
| Jay | Wayland compositor written in Rust |
| Vivarium | Dynamic tiling Wayland compositor using wlroots |
| polonium | Tiling window manager for KWin |
| Volare | Tabbed, tiling Wayland compositor |
| japokwm | wlroots and dwl based tiling wayland compositor |
| velox | Simple window manager based on swc |
| stagen | wlroots-based Wayland compositor |
| newm | Written with laptops and touchpads in mind |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
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