SwayFX is a fork of Sway.
This fork was developed on the basis that Sway is restricted to only include the functionality that existed in i3. The fork ditches the simple wlr_renderer, and replaces it with an fx_renderer, capable of rendering with fancy GLES2 effects. This, along with a couple of minor changes, expands sway’s featureset to include the following:
This is free and open source software.
Features in addition to Sway:
- Blur.
- Anti-aliased rounded corners, borders, and titlebars.
- Shadows.
- Dim unfocused windows.
- Per application saturation control: Allows the user to set the saturation (Digital Vibrance) for specific applications. Great for some FPS games.
- Scratchpad treated as minimize: Allows docks, or panels with a taskbar, to correctly interpret minimize / unminimize requests (thanks to LCBCrion).
Website: github.com/WillPower3309/swayfx
Support:
Developer: William McKinnon
License: MIT License

SwayFX 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.
Explore our comprehensive directory of recommended free and open source software. Our carefully curated collection spans every major software category.This directory is part of our ongoing series of informative articles for Linux enthusiasts. It features hundreds of detailed reviews, along with open source alternatives to proprietary solutions from major corporations such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Autodesk. You’ll also find interesting projects to try, hardware coverage, free programming books and tutorials, and much more. Discovered a useful open source Linux program that we haven’t covered yet? Let us know by completing this form. |

