A dynamic tiling wayland compositor
River is a dynamic tiling Wayland compositor with flexible runtime
configuration.
Check packaging status —
Join us at #river on irc.libera.chat —
Read our man pages, wiki, and
Code of Conduct
The main repository is on codeberg,
which is where the issue tracker may be found and where contributions are accepted.
Read-only mirrors exist on sourcehut
and github.
Note: river has not yet seen a stable 1.0 release and it will be necessary to
make significant breaking changes before 1.0 to realize my longer term plans.
That said, I do my best to avoid gratuitous breaking changes and bugs/crashes
should be rare. If you find a bug don’t hesitate to
open an issue.
Currently river’s window management style is quite similar to
dwm, xmonad, and other classic
dynamic tiling X11 window managers. Windows are automatically arranged in a tiled
layout and shifted around as windows are opened/closed.
Rather than having the tiled layout logic built into the compositor process,
river uses a custom Wayland
protocol
and separate “layout generator” process. A basic layout generator, rivertile,
is provided but users are encouraged to use community-developed layout
generators
or write their own. Examples in C and Python may be found
here.
Tags are used to organize windows rather than workspaces. A window may be
assigned to one or more tags. Likewise, one or more tags may be displayed on a
monitor at a time.
River is configured at runtime using the riverctl tool. It can define
keybindings, set the active layout generator, configure input devices, and more.
On startup, river runs a user-defined init script which usually runs riverctl
commands to set up the user’s configuration.
Note: If you are packaging river for distribution, see PACKAGING.md.
To compile river first ensure that you have the following dependencies
installed. The “development” versions are required if applicable to your
distribution.
Then run, for example:
zig build -Doptimize=ReleaseSafe --prefix ~/.local install
To enable Xwayland support pass the -Dxwayland option as well.
Run zig build -h to see a list of all options.
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), andrivertile(1) man pages.
Currently details such as how tags work across multiple monitors are not
possible for users to configure. It would be possible to extend river’s source
code to allow more flexibility here but this comes at the cost of complexity and
there will always be someone who prefers something slightly different.
My long term plan to address this is to move as much window management policy as
possible out of the river compositor process and into the “layout generator”
process which will need to be renamed to “window manager.” This will give users
much more power and control over river’s behavior and also enable some really
cool workflows. For example, it would be possible to write a window manager in
lisp and use hot code reloading to edit its behavior it while it is running.
This is a non-trivial architectural change and will take a while to implement. I
plan to focus on this change for the 0.4.0 release cycle. Unfortunately, it will
almost certainly break existing river configurations as well. I think the
benefits outweigh that downside though and I will do my best to offer a
reasonable upgrade path.
If my work on river adds value to your life and you’d like to support me
financially you can find donation information here.
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).
The river logo is licensed under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license, see the
license in the logo directory.