2bwm VS river

Distro is Arch Linux and WM is 2bwm

This is a great article and I remember reading it numerous times while I was implementing my own window manager.

For someone interested in working on a really fun and rewarding hobby project a WM is a great one to look into since there are so many resources starting from really small implementations:

- https://github.com/mackstann/tinywm

- https://github.com/venam/2bwm

- https://github.com/dylanaraps/sowm

- https://github.com/dcat/swm

- https://github.com/JLErvin/berry

Which are great at introducing the concepts and allowing you to grok the required libraries.

There are also a bunch of more full featured window managers which will introduce you to more advanced topics:

- https://github.com/baskerville/bspwm

- https://github.com/herbstluftwm/herbstluftwm

- https://www.nongnu.org/ratpoison/

- https://github.com/conformal/spectrwm

Gradually as you get more familiar with the ecosystem a few questions will come up:

Should I use X11 or XCB? - I personally used XCB and didn't find it too difficult to interface with, and there are a large number of implementations which use it (2bwm, bspwm, ratpoison, etc) so you shouldn't have an issue with learning more about it. But the documentation is pretty limited. If you are just wanting to write a toy WM than X11 is perfectly fine.

X or Wayland? - If you're wanting to write your first WM as a hobby project than I would recommend X over wayland just due to the much larger amount of reference material and documentation. You will have a much easier time getting your feet wet. Ignore the comments about X dying as it doesn't really matter for a hobby project, since the whole point is to have fun.

Feel free to check out my window manager which is an example of what just reading this blog post and getting inspired can result in: https://github.com/cfrank/natwm

wm: 2bwm

It's a pity 2bwm does not get the love :) https://github.com/venam/2bwm

More info on the wiki https://github.com/riverwm/river/wiki

Here is the related github issue

If you can get past some minor wayland related annoyances, river is pretty easy imo, you can write a config in whatever format you want, it just needs to be an executable file, the most common type is a shell script. The actual configuration happens by calling the riverctl program from the file, which from what I've heard is a similar method compared to bspwm.

Coming from awesome you may find river more to your liking than sway.

River crashed everytime I closed Chromium. The developer fixed it in 5 minutes :)

I've written a plugin that implements the river-layout-v3 wayland protocol in Hyprland. This means you can run something like rivertile, river-luatile, rivercarro or kile as a layout provider.

Author here. And yeah, as of 0.6.0 it supports master stack - I just called it stack main. I was in fact inspired by river: https://github.com/riverwm/river. River is really promising but is still in very early development. Sway on the other hand has been around for a long time and I, for now, prefer that stability.

In my very specific case, I'd probably start by taking a look at how animations were previously implemented in river, and then I'd pay careful attention to that transform matrix at the end. I'm not super crazy about the implementation using timers to drive it (versus interpolating where the transform should be across a deadline), but I guess they were going for smoothness.

riverwm wayland compositor