labwc

Labwc is a [WIP] free, stacking compositor for Wayland and has the following aims:

• Be light-weight, small and fast
• Have the look and feel of Openbox
• Where practicable, use other software to show wall-paper, take screenshots, and so on

It is in early development, so expect bugs and missing features.

Table of Contents

• Dependencies
• Roadmap
• Inspiration
• Design
• Configuration
• Integration
• Build

Dependencies

Runtime dependencies include wlroots (>=0.10.0), wayland-protocols,xwayland,
libxml2, glib-2.0, cairo and pango.

Roadmap

• Support xwayland
• Parse rc.xml
• Parse themerc
• Read xbm icons
• Show maximize, minimize, close buttons
• Give actions to maximize, minimize, close buttons
• Add grip
• Support layer-shell background (e.g. using swaybg)
• Draw better alt-tab rectangle
• Try restarting and consider catching SIGHUP for --reconfigure
• Implement client-menu
• Implement root-menu

For further details see wiki/Roadmap.

Inspiration

Labwc has been inspired and inflenced by openbox, sway, cage, wio and rootston

Design

Labwc is based on the wlroots library.

The following were considered before choosing wlroots: QtWayland, grefsen, Mir and egmde.

Configuration

See rc.xml and themerc comments for details including keybinds.

Suggest either copying data/rc.xml to ~/.config/labwc/running, or running with:

./build/labwc -c data/rc.xml

Integration

Suggested apps:

• grim - screenshots

Build

meson build && ninja -C build

For further details see tools/build and wiki/Build.