labwc

Labwc is a [WIP] free, stacking compositor for Wayland.

It is in early development and has the following aims:

• Be light-weight, small and fast.

• Have the look and feel of the X11 Window Manager Openbox.

• Where practicable, use other software to show wall-paper, take screenshots, and so on.

• Dependencies

• Roadmap

• Inspiration

• Design

• Configuration

• Integration

• Build

• Debug

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
• Add 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

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 incl. keybinds.

Integration

Suggested apps:

• grim - screenshots

Build

Arch Linux

sudo pacman -S wlroots
git clone https://github.com/johanmalm/labwc
cd labwc
meson build
ninja -C build

Debian

sudo apt install \
	build-essential \
	cmake \
	libwayland-dev \
	wayland-protocols \
	libegl1-mesa-dev \
	libgles2-mesa-dev \
	libdrm-dev libgbm-dev \
	libinput-dev \
	libxkbcommon-dev \
	libudev-dev \
	libpixman-1-dev \
	libsystemd-dev \
	libcap-dev \
	libxcb1-dev \
	libxcb-composite0-dev \
	libxcb-xfixes0-dev \
	libxcb-xinput-dev \
	libxcb-image0-dev \
	libxcb-render-util0-dev \
	libx11-xcb-dev \
	libxcb-icccm4-dev \
	freerdp2-dev \
	libwinpr2-dev \
	libpng-dev \
	libavutil-dev \
	libavcodec-dev \
	libavformat-dev \
	universal-ctags \
	xwayland

# Debian Buster has an old version of meson, so we use pip3
pip3 install --target=$HOME/bin meson

git clone https://github.com/johanmalm/labwc
cd labwc
git clone https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots subprojects/wlroots

# wlroots 0.10.0 is the last version which runs with Wayland 0.16
# (which is what Buster runs)
cd subprojects/wlroots && git checkout 0.10.0 && cd ../..

meson build
ninja -C build

Debug

To enable ASAN and UBSAN, run meson with -Db_sanitize=address,undefined