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River is a dynamic tiling Wayland compositor with flexible runtimeconfiguration.

Checkpackaging status —Join us at#river on irc.libera.chat —Read our man pages,wiki, andCode of Conduct

The main repository is oncodeberg,which is where the issue tracker may be found and where contributions are accepted.

Read-only mirrors exist onsourcehutandgithub.

Note: river has not yet seen a stable 1.0 release and it will be necessary tomake 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/crashesshould be rare. If you find a bug don't hesitate toopen an issue.

Currently river's window management style is quite similar todwm,xmonad, and other classicdynamic tiling X11 window managers. Windows are automatically arranged in a tiledlayout and shifted around as windows are opened/closed.

Rather than having the tiled layout logic built into the compositor process,river uses acustom Waylandprotocoland separate "layout generator" process. A basic layout generator,rivertile,is provided but users are encouraged to use community-developedlayoutgeneratorsor write their own. Examples in C and Python may be foundhere.

Tags are used to organize windows rather than workspaces. A window may beassigned to one or more tags. Likewise, one or more tags may be displayed on amonitor at a time.

River is configured at runtime using theriverctl tool. It can definekeybindings, set the active layout generator, configure input devices, and more.On startup, river runs a user-defined init script which usually runsriverctlcommands to set up the user's configuration.

Note: If you are packaging river for distribution, seePACKAGING.md.

To compile river first ensure that you have the following dependenciesinstalled. The "development" versions are required if applicable to yourdistribution.

• zig 0.13
• wayland
• wayland-protocols
• wlroots 0.18
• 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 Xwayland support pass the-Dxwayland option as well.Runzig build -h to see a list of all options.

River can either be run nested in an X11/Wayland session or directlyfrom a tty using KMS/DRM. Simply run theriver command.

On startup river will run an executable file at$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/river/initif such an executable exists. If$XDG_CONFIG_HOME is not set,~/.config/river/init will be used instead.

Usually this executable is a shell script invokingriverctl(1) to createmappings, start programs such as a layout generator or status bar, andperform other configuration.

An example init script with sane defaults is providedherein the example directory.

For complete documentation see theriver(1),riverctl(1), andrivertile(1) man pages.

Currently details such as how tags work across multiple monitors are notpossible for users to configure. It would be possible to extend river's sourcecode to allow more flexibility here but this comes at the cost of complexity andthere will always be someone who prefers something slightly different.

My long term plan to address this is to move as much window management policy aspossible out of the river compositor process and into the "layout generator"process which will need to be renamed to "window manager." This will give usersmuch more power and control over river's behavior and also enable some reallycool workflows. For example, it would be possible to write a window manager inlisp 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. Iplan to focus on this change for the 0.4.0 release cycle. Unfortunately, it willalmost certainly break existing river configurations as well. I think thebenefits outweigh that downside though and I will do my best to offer areasonable upgrade path.

If my work on river adds value to your life and you'd like to support mefinancially you can find donation informationhere.

River is released under the GNU General Public License v3.0 only.

The protocols in theprotocol directory are released under various licenses byvarious parties. You should refer to the copyright block of each protocol forthe licensing information. The protocols prefixed withriver and developed bythis project are released under the ISC license (as stated in their copyrightblocks).

The river logo is licensed under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license, see thelicense in the logo directory.