This software is now deprecated. Use something else.

Any serious (non-toy) Wayland compositor using wlroots would have to reimplement half of sway's code. This library hopes to provide that half, while keeping its nose out of WM decisions.

wlstem is a WIP high-level library that aids in creating Wayland compositors, built on top of wlroots.

wlroots does a lot of the heavy work for those who wish to create Wayland compositors -- but not all of it. This library's main goal is to provide functionality that virtually any compositor using wlroots will want to implement, and which does not vary with the compositor's window management policies.

wlstem started as a fork of sway, the i3-compatible Wayland compositor made by wlroots' creator. The remaining code from sway, currently located at mod_sway directory, now serves as an example Wayland compositor using this library.

Note: this library is work in progress: features are still being transferred from sway's modified code to wlstem.

• wlroots
• meson (*)
• pcre
• json-c
• pango
• cairo
• pixman
• Wayland's core libraries:
  • wayland-server
  • wayland-client
  • wayland-cursor
  • wayland-egl
• wayland-protocols (*)
• evdev
• libinput
• xkbcommon (†)
• mesa (GLESv2) (‡)

(*) Compile-time dependencies.
(†) Only if xwayland support is desired.
(‡) Usually installed by default at Unix-like systems

Ensure all dependencies are installed, then build with

meson build/
ninja -C build/

And optionally install with

sudo ninja -C build/ install

The resulting library shall be located at build/wlstem/libwlstem.so and the example program, at build/mod_sway/sway.

Run the generated sway binary from a TTY, also known as a console.