Overview

River is a dynamic tiling Wayland compositor with flexible runtime configuration. It is free and open source software.

River is packaged by various Linux distributions as well as FreeBSD. The source code is hosted on codeberg, which is where the issue tracker may be found and where contributions are accepted. Read-only mirrors of the source code exist on sourcehut and github.

The latest river release can be found here on codeberg.

River has not yet seen a stable 1.0 release and it will be necessary to make significant breaking changes before 1.0 to realize my longer term goals. That said, I do my best to avoid gratuitous breaking changes and bugs/crashes should be rare. If you find a bug don’t hesitate to open an issue.

Features

Currently river’s window management style is quite similar to dwm, xmonad, and other classic dynamic tiling X11 window managers. Windows are automatically arranged in a tiled layout and shifted around as windows are opened/closed.

Rather than having the tiled layout logic built into the compositor process, river uses a custom Wayland protocol and separate “layout generator” process. A basic layout generator, rivertile, is provided but users are encouraged to use community-developed layout generators or write their own. Examples in C and Python may be found here.

Tags are used to organize windows rather than workspaces. A window may be assigned to one or more tags. Likewise, one or more tags may be displayed on a monitor at a time.

River is configured at runtime using the riverctl tool. It can define keybindings, set the active layout generator, configure input devices, and more. On startup, river runs a user-defined init script which usually runs riverctl commands to set up the user’s configuration.

Documentation

The official river documentation is the man pages. We also have a wiki.

To discuss river and ask questions, join our IRC channel, #river on irc.libera.chat. Our code of conduct may be found here

Future Plans

Currently details such as how tags work across multiple monitors are not possible for users to configure. It would be possible to extend river’s source code to allow more flexibility here but this comes at the cost of complexity and there will always be someone who prefers something slightly different.

My long term plan to address this is to move as much window management policy as possible out of the river compositor process and into the “layout generator” process which will need to be renamed to “window manager.” This will give users much more power and control over river’s behavior and also enable some really cool workflows. For example, it would be possible to write a window manager in lisp and use hot code reloading to edit its behavior while it is running.

This is a non-trivial architectural change and will take a while to implement. I plan to focus on this change for the 0.4.0 release cycle. Unfortunately, it will almost certainly break existing river configurations as well. I think the benefits outweigh that downside though and I will do my best to offer a reasonable upgrade path.

Donate

If my work on river adds value to your life and you’d like to support me financially you can find donation information here.