RediWM

RediWM is a wlroots compositor that draws its whole shell itself: taskbar, start menu, settings, lock and login screens, notifications and OSDs, all in one process, benchmarked against labwc to stay as lean.

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/60bc1190-694c-4fb7-b2bc-d90e5e9faa90

Features

• One process, not a stack: no waybar, greeter, launcher or notification daemon to wire up.
• Pan-and-zoom desktop: a canvas several screens wide; zoom the desktop or single windows.
• Lock and login screens with PAM, plus rediwm-dm, a small display manager.
• Notification daemon with actions, images and do-not-disturb rules.
• Sharp X11 apps on HiDPI through Xwayland native scaling.
• GPU glass behind shell surfaces, re-blurred only when needed.
• Works with wlroots tools: wlr-randr, kanshi, swaylock, swayidle, grim, wf-recorder, wayvnc, docks.
• JSON IPC (rediwm-msg), desktop icons, a file manager and an image viewer.
• Crash-resilient: bounded restarts and layout autosave.

Installing

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/oxydizer/rediwm/HEAD/scripts/install.sh | sh    # add `-s -- --dm` for rediwm-dm

scripts/install.sh installs the prebuilt release for your distro (Arch, Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora on x86_64, and their derivatives): the compositor, the apps and the exact wlroots 0.20 they were tested with, including the window-title patch. Installing never replaces your login manager. SDDM, GDM and the like keep working, and RediWM only appears as a session in their picker. The rediwm-dm login manager is installed only with --dm, and even then it is not enabled (see below).

Building and running

Requirements: Zig 0.16, wlroots 0.20 (scripts/install.sh --build builds it into a private prefix on Debian/Ubuntu, and REDIWM_PRIVATE_WLROOTS=1 does so on Arch and Fedora), and the development files for Wayland, wayland-protocols, xkbcommon, pixman, FreeType, HarfBuzz, Fontconfig, librsvg/GdkPixbuf, PangoCairo, libinput, PAM, libpulse, libpipewire-0.3, Poppler GLib, libseccomp, libjpeg and libpng. Optional: Xwayland, foot, brightnessctl, gio/xdg-open, git (Files repository status).

Runtime portals: xdg-desktop-portal, xdg-desktop-portal-wlr for screen sharing, and xdg-desktop-portal-gtk for fallback portals. scripts/install.sh installs all three.

zig build run -- foot                     # nested in your current Wayland session
zig build -Doptimize=ReleaseSafe          # for daily use and measurements
sh scripts/install-session.sh             # install and restart the running session
sh scripts/install-session.sh --no-restart --dm   # install only, plus rediwm-dm

Run from a checkout, scripts/install.sh builds that checkout (dependencies, then install-session.sh with the arguments you give it).

Releasing

scripts/make-release.sh builds each distro's tarball (rediwm-<distro>-x86_64.tar.gz) in a clean container of that distro, with scripts/build-wlroots.sh's pinned.

rediwm-pdf FILE opens one PDF in a sandboxed viewer process. It requires Landlock ABI 3 or newer and a compositor with security-context-v1 (including RediWM); it refuses to parse a document if isolation cannot be established.

Using it

All bindings live in [keybinds] ("noop" disables one).

• Alt+drag moves windows, Alt+right-drag resizes. Super+Alt+mouse or a middle-button drag pans the desktop; Super+Alt+scroll zooms it, and Alt+scroll over a window zooms just that window. Ordinary desktop zoom scales all windows together around the pointer, up to 100%, without changing their world positions. Desktop icons stay fixed by default; the taskbar stays fixed. The shared volume/brightness OSD also shows the desktop zoom percentage.
• Window switching zoom in Settings → Appearance controls Alt+Tab, directional focus and taskbar activation. Boost window (the default) temporarily brings the selected floating window to 100% on-screen size while preserving desktop zoom, its position and its saved window zoom. Switching away restores its original scale. Keep zoom only pans; Focus camera zooms the desktop to the selected window's depth, fading windows that would grow beyond full size. In that mode, desktop zoom also steps through the depths of open windows above 100%. Configure this with [compositor] focus_zoom = "boost", "keep", or "camera". Window reveals ease over 320 ms, and titlebar scrolling uses the same eased window zoom as Alt+scroll. Animation speed and reduced motion apply to these transitions; [animations.camera_reveal] can override the pan.
• Window tabs in Settings → Appearance lets you enable tabs per app using RediWM chrome (XDG, KDE or X11 decorations). Open an app once to list it. + opens another window as a tab in that frame; ordinary launches stay separate. Each tab has a close button, and the outer close button closes the group while respecting app confirmation dialogs. Disabling tabs restores separate windows. App IDs are saved in [compositor] window_tab_apps. Arrow buttons and scrolling over the strip switch tabs; Alt+scroll still zooms the window. Apps need a desktop entry with a usable launch command; launches that only activate an existing window do not create a tab.
• Settings (start menu cog) is a regular window covering display modes, scale and night light, input, audio, appearance, shortcuts and the desktop canvas. Changes are saved to the config with its comments intact.
• The lock screen covers every output; Escape clears the field and never unlocks. It engages before the system sleeps, and sleep waits until it is on screen ([compositor] lock_on_suspend, on by default), and on loginctl lock-session. RediWM doesn't lock on idle itself: run swayidle -w timeout 300 'swaylock -f' from [[autostart]].
• Desktop icons run a .desktop launcher only if it is installed, owned by root, executable, or an exact copy of an installed entry. Any other launcher shows as the file it is until you choose Allow Launching from its menu.
• rediwm-dm runs the greeter as an unprivileged user on its own VT. After installing, disable your current display manager, sudo systemctl enable rediwm-dm and reboot; options live in /etc/rediwm/dm.conf.
• In rediwm-files, Space opens images, PDFs and text files. Text Editor (rediwm-editor [FILE ...]) opens text files in tabs in one window per display. Use Ctrl+N for a new tab, Ctrl+O to open, Ctrl+S to save, Ctrl+Shift+S for the existing Save As dialog, Ctrl+Page Up/Down to switch tabs, Ctrl+W to close a tab, and Ctrl+F / F3 to find text. It supports UTF-8 files up to 16 MiB, preserves BOM and line endings, and prompts before discarding changes. Files, Images and Text Editor also run on other Wayland compositors.
• Games get pointer lock and relative motion. VMs and remote desktops can capture shortcuts; Super+Escape takes them back.
• The desktop renders before autostart; session environment publication and audio connection do not block frames or input. Xwayland starts on the first X11 connection, including with native scaling.
• X11 limits of wlroots 0.20: X11→Wayland drag-and-drop doesn't start, and X11 pointer input on a second output doesn't arrive.

Protocols

Beyond xdg-shell, layer-shell and Xwayland:

Configuration

$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/rediwm/config.toml (REDIWM_CONFIG overrides) is written with commented defaults on first run and reloads on save; a parse error keeps the previous config. Sections: [theme], [input], [input_method], [compositor], [region], [idle], [night_light], [notifications], [desktop], [polkit], [ipc], [keybinds], [[outputs]], [[autostart]], [[window_rules]], [[notification_rules]] and [[sandbox_allow]].

The .toml files use a line-based TOML subset, including standalone theme files.

Window rules match by globs; for each property the last matching rule wins:

[[window_rules]]
app_id = ["firefox", "chromium"]
title = "*Picture-in-Picture*"
opacity = 0.9
skip_taskbar = true
focus = false

Matchers: app_id, title, x11_class, x11_instance, backend, dialog and exclude_*. Properties: output, x, y, center, width, height, maximized, fullscreen, focus, depth, opacity, decorations, skip_taskbar.

IPC

The socket is $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/rediwm-<WAYLAND_DISPLAY>.sock (or REDIWM_SOCKET), in a private directory only. rediwm-msg wraps it (rediwm-msg outputs, output-config DP-1 --scale 1.5, notifications, …); src/ipc/protocol.zig is the reference. Synthetic input and pixel reads need [ipc] automation = true (or REDIWM_IPC_AUTOMATION=1), and everything is refused while locked.

IPC v1 is UTF-8 JSON, one request and one response per newline. Every request uses this envelope (command names are case-sensitive snake_case):

{"version":1,"id":1,"command":"windows"}
{"version":1,"id":2,"command":"move_cursor","params":{"x":100,"y":200}}

Settings and desktop inspection also work without opening Settings:

More

• SECURITY.md: security boundaries and decisions.
• TESTING.md: unit and headless integration tests.
• D-Bus transport and polkit agent.
• Fonts: Manrope and JetBrains Mono (OFL); cursors: phinger-cursors (CC BY-SA 4.0).

License

RediWM's own code is dual-licensed under either of

• Apache License, Version 2.0
• MIT license

at your option. Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in RediWM by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual-licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.

Bundled third-party assets keep their own licenses: the fonts under assets/fonts (SIL OFL 1.1) and the cursors under assets/cursors (CC BY-SA 4.0).