CoW — a stacking window manager for Wayland

I dabbled with starting a PoC compositor (codename Waxland) that would use X11 as an IPC between the compositor and a WM. This in theory should allow to run old unmodified X11 WM binaries to manage Wayland windows. I imagine with drawing it would require either implementing some X11 drawing primitives or being creative with XWayland.

Does it sound like a something that is doable with river?

Hi all,

Thanks for the comments, really appreciate it.

Cow is just a bit of fun for me, due to the risk of X11’s longevity being in question for a while, and I did not want to be without an environment under Wayland if I’m forced to use it, which was unfamiliar to me.

I’d previously written about this here: https://github.com/fvwmorg/fvwm3/discussions/1258

River is a hugely important project — and all of CoW owes its existence to Isaac for producing it. Thank you for this! Hopefully it will spawn other hobby WMs as well — the list on the River’s wiki (https://codeberg.org/river/wiki/src/branch/main/pages/wm-list.md) is already growing quite a bit.

The upfront cost of trying to create something like CoW with MWM borders is that SSD decorations have to be implemented from scratch — that’s the bulk of the work I’ve put in to this, to make that happen. Including vector button drawing routines.

A lot of people ask me if they can have something like FvwmButtons where applications are swallowed (reparented, in X parlance) — which would be great for creating dynamic panels. But Wayland does not support this — and this is perhaps of the cornerstones in FVWM’s history, the ability for people to create custom panels using external applications. Although CoW does have cowbuttons(1), it can only take this idea so far.

Although I’m “‘marketing” CoW as a FVWM/MWM replacement — it doesn’t have to look like that t all. If anything, it’s more of a framework for creating an environment for managing windows — both physically and cosmetically. So if you can look past the blocky-nature of the screenshots, you might find it useful. It also has the beginning of a DSL which is making scripting useful, but hopefully less ugly than FVWM’s Functions.

Any questions on CoW, come see us in #cow-wayland on irc.libera.chat.

Thanks everyone!

Thomas

CoW was started by Thomas Adam, long-time lead developer of Fvwm. It's intended as the Wayland-successor, because porting Fvwm from X isn't feasible.