riverwm/river

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_license

Adoption not part of the score

4264 stars · 168 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

River is a non-monolithic Wayland compositor written in Zig that separates the compositor from the window manager, letting users pick or write any window manager implementing the river-window-management-v1 protocol. It provides rendering, input handling, Xwayland support, and stable protocol extensions while deferring all window management policy to a swappable external process.

Use cases

• run a Wayland compositor with a custom or third-party window manager
• write a Wayland window manager in a high-level language without touching compositor internals
• hot-swap window managers without restarting running Wayland applications
• build a minimal tiling desktop environment on Linux or FreeBSD
• experiment with new window management designs on a stable compositor base

When to choose

• you want to develop or customize a Wayland window manager with a low barrier to entry
• you need a performant, stable compositor with Xwayland and protocol extension support
• you want to switch window managers without killing your session

When to avoid

• you want a batteries-included desktop environment with a built-in window manager and shell
• you need a compositor for a distribution that only ships monolithic solutions
• you require a project with a traditional single OSS license file (licensing is REUSE/CC-BY-SA for docs)

Facets

application · maturity active

graphics gui developer-tools operating-systems desktop-applications developer-tools bsd cpp rust wayland-compositor window-manager wlroots zig tiling xwayland linux

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="riverwm/river")