Dwl: Dwm for Wayland

#1

Post by theycallhermax » Fri, Jul 25, 2025, 1:40 PM UTC

Dwl: Dwm for Wayland
codeberg.org

Re: Dwl: Dwm for Wayland

#2

Post by cnity » Fri, Jul 25, 2025, 2:22 PM UTC

I wonder if it was considered to submit this as a dwm patch instead.

Re: Dwl: Dwm for Wayland

#3

Post by snvzz » Fri, Jul 25, 2025, 2:23 PM UTC

hopefully with utf-8 support?

Re: Dwl: Dwm for Wayland

#4

Post by xwiz » Fri, Jul 25, 2025, 2:23 PM UTC

Looks like a great project. I'm a big TWM fan, so I would also like to direct attention to my daily driver, Niri. https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri

Re: Dwl: Dwm for Wayland

#5

Post by mort96 » Fri, Jul 25, 2025, 2:25 PM UTC

cnity wrote: post #2

I wonder if it was considered to submit this as a dwm patch instead.

An X window manager and a Wayland compositor are so radically different beasts that it would probably require a monumental refactor of DWM to make it capable of having an X back-end and a wlroots back-end. Probably easier to just re-create DWM's interface on top of wlroots, like what Sway did with i3.

Also, DWM has an explicit goal of being minimal and to not grow too big. There's no way in hell that Suckless would accept a patch which makes the code way more complex and over 2x larger to make DWM work as a Wayland compositor.

Re: Dwl: Dwm for Wayland

#6

Post by bravetraveler » Fri, Jul 25, 2025, 2:29 PM UTC

mort96 wrote: post #5

cnity wrote: post #2

I wonder if it was considered to submit this as a dwm patch instead.

An X window manager and a Wayland compositor are so radically different beasts that it would probably require a monumental refactor of DWM to make it capable of having an X back-end and a wlroots back-end. Probably easier to just re-create DWM's interface on top of wlroots, like what Sway did with i3. Also, DWM has an explicit goal of being minimal and to not grow too big. There's no way in hell that Suckless would a…

Suspect you're right, from Acknowledgements:

    dwl began by extending the TinyWL example provided (CC0) by the sway/wlroots developers. This was made possible in many cases by looking at how sway accomplished something, then trying to do the same in as suckless a way as possible.

Re: Dwl: Dwm for Wayland

#7

Post by woodrowbarlow » Fri, Jul 25, 2025, 2:30 PM UTC

cnity wrote: post #2

I wonder if it was considered to submit this as a dwm patch instead.

i think fork was the correct approach -- it was written in such a way that many of the popular dwm patches can be applied cleanly to dwl.

(i used dwl for quite a while. strong recommend.)

Re: Dwl: Dwm for Wayland

#8

Post by dodomodo » Fri, Jul 25, 2025, 2:34 PM UTC

[flagged]

Re: Dwl: Dwm for Wayland

#9

Post by alex-moon » Fri, Jul 25, 2025, 2:36 PM UTC

Big big fan of dwm, but this wasn't mature when I tried it. I switched to Hyprland and I have to say it has many improvements over dwm.

Re: Dwl: Dwm for Wayland

#10

Post by ivanjermakov » Fri, Jul 25, 2025, 2:45 PM UTC

cnity wrote: post #2

I wonder if it was considered to submit this as a dwm patch instead.

Implementation difference is so big that is makes no sense. Also, Wayland support is obviously out of scope for dwm.