cagebreak VS kiwmi

There's also a Wayland WM directly inspired by ratpoison! https://github.com/project-repo/cagebreak

That's true for a lot of libraries, you have to maintain the code, I would treat that as a fact of life, It might be worth noting there are some projects designed to provide a high level abstraction over wlroots which might be different: cage -> used by cagebreak phoc -> used by phosh and wayfire -> used by swayfire.

cagebreak as far as i can tell is a one man project (it uses cage to provide a high level abstraction over wlroots).

I also remembered cagebreak (wayland window manager). it uses cage (which is defined as a "wayland kiosk" but might also be used as a high level abstraction over wlroots).

Anyway, like you I also wanted to see how far I could go on Wayland. After trying out a number of wms I settled on cagebreak which is modeled on ratpoison. It's still in early development but worked well enough for me to give it a semi daily driver status. It works really well with emacs too, without the single-thread issue. I went for a pure Wayland experience (without XWayland as well), so I couldn't some apps I normally use - but I was able to create something quite close to my xorg setup.

There's cagebreak, wich is inspired by ratpoison. It's different yo hlwm, but it has the same concept of containers, but every container only have the "max" layout

Could it—by any chance—be kiwmi? But it ain’t tiling (unless you make it so) & the fully manual thing also depends on the config. AFAIK that behaviour was explicitly mentioned only in its early history, as you can see e.g. in PR#1