hello-wayland
swm
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| hello-wayland | swm | |
|---|---|---|
| 4 | 1 | |
| 133 | 113 | |
| - | - | |
| 5.0 | 1.8 | |
| about 2 months ago | almost 2 years ago | |
| C | C | |
| MIT License | - |
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hello-wayland
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Image in C
I first saw the trick at https://github.com/emersion/hello-wayland
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How does a Wayland compositor and client communicate?
hello-wayland and tinywl are simple wayland client and server respectively. Also wayland-book
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How X Window Managers Work, and How to Write One
You think this is bad? Just look at a native Wayland "Hello World" client [1]. This doesn't even print hello world. You have to do the text rendering yourself. And you need at least 500 more lines to implement the equivalent to a simple XGetImage() call.
1.: https://github.com/emersion/hello-wayland/blob/master/main.c
- How to link Wayland header files in C?
swm
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How X Window Managers Work, and How to Write One
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
What are some alternatives?
hello_imgui - Hello, Dear ImGui: unleash your creativity in app development and prototyping
herbstluftwm - A manual tiling window manager for X11
arcan - Arcan - [Display Server, Multimedia Framework, Game Engine] -> "Desktop Engine"
2bwm - A fast floating WM written over the XCB library and derived from mcwm.
spectrwm - A small dynamic tiling window manager for X11.
bspwm - A tiling window manager based on binary space partitioning
dwl - dwm for Wayland - ARCHIVE: development has moved to Codeberg
mako - A lightweight Wayland notification daemon
oguri - A very nice animated wallpaper daemon for Wayland compositors
sowm - An itsy bitsy floating window manager (220~ sloc!).