newm-atha is a Wayland compositor written with laptops and touchpads in mind. It’s a fork of newm.
The idea is, instead of placing windows inside the small viewport (that is, the monitor) to arrange them along an arbitrarily large two-dimensional wall (generally without windows overlapping) and focus the compositors job on moving around along this wall efficiently and providing ways to the user to rearrange the wall such that they find the overall layout intuitive.
Windows are placed on a two-dimensional grid of tiles taking either one by one, one by two, two by one, … tiles of that grid. The compositor shows a one by one, two by two, … view of that grid but scales the windows so they are usable on any zoom level (that is, zooming out the compositor actually changes the windows sizes). This makes for example switching between a couple of fullscreen applications very easy – place them in adjacent one by one tiles and have the compositor show a one by one view. And if you need to see them in parallel, zoom out. Then back in, and so on…
This is free and open source software.
Website: sr.ht/~atha/newm-atha
Support:
Developer: Atharv “atha” Gupte, Jonas Bucher (developer of newm)
License: MIT License
newm is written in Python. Learn Python 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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