Open Source C Wayland Compositors

wlroots is a flexible and composable C library that abstracts backends (KMS/DRM, libinput, X11, headless) and implements a full suite of Wayland protocols. It’s designed to empower compositor developers to focus on unique features rather than boilerplate, offering support for rendering, input, output management, and XWayland integration.

wlmaker is a lightweight, Window Maker–inspired Wayland compositor offering stacking window management, multiple workspaces, and a NeXTSTEP aesthetic. Early in development, it includes basic features like docks and hot corners. Packaged for Fedora and Arch, it targets nostalgic workflows with modern Wayland support.

Sway is a tiling Wayland compositor and a drop-in replacement for the i3 window manager for X11. It works with your existing i3 configuration and supports most of i3's features, plus a few extras. Sway allows you to arrange your application windows logically, rather than spatially. Windows are arranged into a grid by default which maximizes the efficiency of your screen and can be quickly manipulated using only the keyboard.

Cagebreak is a Wayland tiling compositor based on Cage and inspired by Ratpoison. This project provides a successor to Ratpoison for Wayland. However, this is no reimplementation of Ratpoison. Cagebreak supports Arch Linux and uses the libraries and versions from extra and core at the time of release. Most other setups work with a bit of luck. You can build Cagebreak with the meson build system. It requires Wayland, wlroots and xkbcommon to be installed. Note that Cagebreak is developed against the latest tag of wlroots, in order not to constantly chase breaking changes as soon as they occur. Cagebreak is keyboard-based. Everything regarding cagebreak can be done through the keyboard and it is our view that it should be. This does not mean that pointers, touchpads and such are not available for the few applications that do require them.

Labwc is a wlroots-based window-stacking compositor for Wayland, inspired by Openbox. It is light-weight and independent with a focus on simply stacking windows well and rendering some window decorations. It takes a no-bling/frills approach and says no to features such as animations. It relies on clients for panels, screenshots, wallpapers and so on to create a full desktop environment. Labwc tries to stay in keeping with wlroots and sway in terms of general approach and coding style. Firstly, we believe that there is a need for a simple Wayland window-stacking compositor that strikes a balance between minimalism and bloat approximately at the level where Window Managers like Openbox reside in the X11 domain. Most of the core developers are accustomed to low-resource Desktop Environments such as Mate/XFCE or standalone Window Managers such as Openbox under X11.

maomaowm is a minimal yet smooth Wayland compositor in Rust, featuring animated tiling layouts and low resource usage. Aimed for performance on older hardware, it supports multi-monitor setups and is available via NixOS and Arch Linux. Users praise its fluidity even on decade-old laptops.

A wlroots and dwl-based tiling Wayland compositor based around creating layouts. Japokwm is a dynamic tiling wayland compositor where you are able to create new layouts without the hassle of editing the source code. You just give it information about where windows go and it will handle stuff such as resizing all by itself.