sowm VS waymonad

To add to the comment above, if memory is all you care about, I managed to get it down to 75MB once with custom kernel and sowm.

You can check https://github.com/dylanaraps/sowm It will be handy to you to understand how Dwm works

Or sowm.

I managed to get 75mb with X session on Void. (sowm + minimal kernel)

Then perhaps you should have a look at sowm. It is a fork (if you can still call it that) of dwm that has no tiling support and no bar.

If you are r/linux4noobs then you probably won't be able to get it running but... I managed to get voidlinux with sowm and a custom kernel to 70MB memory usage.

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

I am personally waiting for Waymonad. https://github.com/waymonad/waymonad

It takes time, but the teams behind wlroots etc are doing good work to make sure that wms managed by smaller teams can exist. There are even clones for your specific wm on wayland. See https://github.com/waymonad/waymonad

In addition, there was the last commit in 2019. Thus, it can be assumed that the project is dead and therefore nothing will change on the current state. And according to https://github.com/waymonad/waymonad/issues/44, there are probably not enough people who would actively participate in a fork.

Ideally xmonad would be ported/xmonad devs would be working on waymonad, but I doubt it will happen. Waymonad seems to be abandoned.

Nice to see Qtile on Wayland. But I'm personally waiting for xmonad on Wayland.

https://github.com/waymonad/waymonad

I wouldn't count on it, as Waymonad has not seen active development since 2019 and the Haskell bindings to wlroots have not been updated since 2019 as well. There is a fork, but it has not been active since September 2021. Also, it was based on wlroots, not sway.

That's what the XMonad fans are using: https://github.com/waymonad/waymonad lets you write your Wayland compositor in Haskell, is analogy to the way XMonad lets you write your X window manager in Haskell.

Unfortunately it was abandoned https://github.com/waymonad/waymonad/issues/44

regarding keeping an interest, waymonad has been dead for something like two and a half years but according to startrack it's still getting people giving him stars so i don't think you should worry about it.