Awesome Wayland

A lightly-curated list of Wayland code and resources. Please investigate these projects on your own before fully committing to them! I have personal experience with some of the projects here, but for the others I rely heavily on the community for submissions, and generally just do a quick code search to see if it looks like the project supports Wayland natively.

If you want to contribute, please read this.

Table of contents

• Break Notifiers
• Brightness Control
• Browsers Without X Library Dependency
• Clipboard Managers
• Compositors
• Display Configuration
• Email Clients
• Emulation
• IM
• Image Viewers
• Key Binding Management
• Launchers
• Libraries
• Music Players
• Notifications
• On-screen Keyboards
• PDF Viewers
• Process Managers
• Screen Locking
• Screencasting
• Screenshots
• Session Management
• Status Bars
• Subtitle Editors
• Terminal Emulators
• Text Editors
• Tools
• Video Players
• Wallpaper
• License

Break Notifiers

• Ianny - Periodically informes user to take breaks by keeping track of usage patterns

Brightness Control

No Wayland-specific requirements, so you can use your xorg solution of choice to control screen brightness, like brightnessctl, brillo, light, or just directly manipulate /sys/class/backlight.

• Gammastep - Day/night gamma modifier that adjusts the color temperature of your screen.
• Wlsunset - Day/night gamma adjustments for Wayland compositors supporting wlr-gamma-control-unstable-v1
• Clight - Day/night gamma adjustments for Wayland compositors supporting wlr-gamma-control-unstable-v1; automatic screen backlight calibration to match ambient brightness using either webcam or ambient light sensor devices; screen dimming.
• Luminance - A simple GTK application to control brightness of displays including external displays supporting DDC/CI

Browsers without X library dependency

• Firefox and forks

  • Firefox - For using Firefox on wayland just add MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 to your environment variables
  • Librewolf - An independent fork of Firefox, with the primary goals of privacy, security and user freedom
  • Tor Browser - Tor Browser Bundle: anonymous browsing using Firefox and Tor

• QtWebEngine

  • Crusta - Fast, modern and minimal desktop web browser with rich features
  • Dooble - The weather bug browser. Minimal, cute, and unusually stable
  • Falkon - KDE web browser
  • Viper Browser - A lightweight browser using QtWebEngine
  • Qutebrowser - a keyboard-focused browser with a minimal GUI

• WebKit2GTK

  • Surfer - Simple keyboard based webkit2gtk browser
  • wyeb - A vim-like webkit2gtk browser

Clipboard Managers

• copyq - CopyQ is an advanced clipboard manager with editing and scripting features.
• wayclip - Wayland clipboard utility
• wl-clipboard - Command-line copy/paste utilities for Wayland

Compositors

• Cagebreak - A Wayland tiling compositor inspired by Ratpoison
• Cardboard - A scrollable tiling Wayland compositor
• dwl - A rewrite of DWM for Wayland
• hikari - A hybrid stacking/tiling Wayland compositor
• Hyprland - Hyprland is a dynamic tiling Wayland compositor that doesn't sacrifice on its looks.
• japokwm - A wlroots based dynamic tiling wayland compositor based around creating layouts
• Kiwmi - A fully programmable Wayland compositor
• KWin - KDE window manager and compositor
• labwc - A stacking Wayland compositor with look and feel of openbox
• Mutter - A window and compositing manager that displays and manages your desktop via OpenGL
• newm - A Wayland compositor written with laptops and touchpads in mind
• river - A dynamic tiling Wayland compositor
• Sway - i3-compatible Wayland compositor
• tinywl+ - A stacking wayland compositor based on tinywl. Great starting place for compositor development.
• Velox - Velox is a simple window manager based on swc, inspired by dwm and xmonad
• Vivarium - A dynamic tiling Wayland compositor using wlroots, with desktop semantics inspired by xmonad
• Waybox - An openbox clone on Wayland
• Wayfire - 3D Wayland compositor
• Weston - Reference compositor for Wayland
• Qtile - A full-featured, hackable tiling window manager written and configured in Python, now supports wayland

Display Configuration

• Disman - General screen management software for different compositors based on KScreen
• Kanshi - Dynamic display configuration
• KScreen - KDE's screen management software
• kscreen-doctor - An xrandr-like utility for Plasma
• nwg-displays - Output management utility for sway Wayland compositor, inspired by wdisplays and wlay.
• swaymsg - General settings utility for Sway that also manages displays
• Wallutils - A set of utilities to manage monitors, resolutions, wallpapers and timed wallpapers
• wayout - A Simple tool to set output modes for wlroots compositors implementing zwlr_output_power_management_v1
• wdisplays - GUI display configurator for wlroots compositors
• wlay - Graphical output management for Wayland
• wlopm - Wayland output power management tool
• wlr-randr - An xrandr clone for wlroots compositors

Email Clients

• KMail - Feature-rich email client that supports many protocols
• Thunderbird - Standalone mail and news reader from mozilla.org

Emulation

• Waydroid - A container-based approach to boot a full Android system on GNU/Linux

IM

• Neochat - A Matrix client made with Kirigami
• Ruqola - A Rocket.Chat client made with QtQuick/QML

Image Viewers

• Gwenview - Image viewer by KDE
• imv - A command line image viewer for X11/Wayland
• Koko - Image viewer for desktop and mobile
• LXImage-Qt - Simple and fast image viewer in Qt
• mvi - A command line image viewer utilizing mpv
• oculante — A fast, unobstrusive portable image viewer
• Pix - Maui's image viewer for desktop and mobile
• Swayimg - Image viewer for Sway/Wayland
• vimiv - An image viewer with vim-like keybindings

Key Binding Management

• keyd - System-wide daemon to remap keys using kernel input primitives (evdev, uinput)
• swhkd - A display protocol-independent hotkey daemon

Launchers

• albert - A fast and flexible keyboard launcher
• bemenu - Dynamic menu library and client program inspired by dmenu
• dmenu-wayland - dmenu-wl is an efficient dynamic menu for wayland (wlroots)
• fuzzel - Application launcher for wlroots based Wayland compositors, similar to rofi's drun mode
• kickoff - Application launcher with a focus on snappyness
• KRunner - Application launcher for Plasma
• LavaLauncher - A simple launcher panel for Wayland desktops
• Mauncher - A GTK-based alternative to dmenu for Wayland which supports display scaling
• nwg-launchers - A GTK-based application grid launcher, button bar and dmenu for Wayland
• sirula - Simple app launcher for Wayland written in Rust
• wldash - Wayland dashboard and launcher written in Rust
• Wofi - A launcher/menu program for wlroots based Wayland compositors such as sway
• yofi - A minimalistic menu for wayland
• rofi - A fork of rofi with Wayland support
• tofi - Tiny dynamic menu for Wayland

Libraries

• client toolkit - A toolkit for writing Wayland clients in Rust
• Mir - Mir is set of libraries for building Wayland based shells
• smithay - A modular smithy for making Wayland compositors in Rust
• swc - A library for making a simple Wayland compositor
• wld - A primitive drawing library targeted at Wayland
• wlroots - Pluggable, composable, unopinionated modules for building a Wayland compositor

Music Players

• Elisa - A music player that is simple, reliable, and a joy to use
• vvave - Maui's music player for desktop and mobile

Notifications

• avizo - Simple notification daemon, mainly intended to be used for multimedia keys
• fnott - Keyboard driven and lightweight Wayland notification daemon for wlroots-based compositors
• Mako - A lightweight Wayland notification daemon
• dunst - A highly configurable and lightweight notification daemon
• swaync - A simple notification daemon with a GTK gui for notifications and the control center
• wob - A lightweight overlay volume/backlight/progress/anything bar for Wayland

On-screen Keyboards

• wf-osk - A very, very basic on-screen keyboard using gtkmm, virtual-keyboard-v1 and layer-shell protocols

PDF Viewers

• Okular - KDE Document Viewer
• zathura - A document viewer

Process Managers

• Qps - Qt Process Viewer and Manager

Screen Locking

• gtklock - GTK-based lockscreen for Wayland
• swayidle - Idle management daemon for Wayland
• swaylock - Screen locker for Wayland
• swaylock-effects - A fork of swaylock with effects such as a blurred screenshot as background or a clock on the lockscreen
• waylock - A simple screenlocker for Wayland compositors

Screencasting

• GNOME ScreenCast - GNOME's default screen recorder embedded in Mutter
• Green Recorder - Screen recorder for GNOME (unmaintained!)
• Kooha - Minimalistic screen recorder for GNOME and Plasma using the xdg-desktop-portal ScreenCast protocol
• OBS Studio - Compositor-independent screen recorder with support for v4l2loopback
• Peek - An animated gif recorder for GNOME
• RecApp - Simple screen recorder for GNOME
• ssr-wlroots - A version of SimpleScreenRecorder with support for wlroots-based compositors (more specifically, those that support wlr-screencopy-v1 and xdg-output) - doesn't support recording area selection and has issues with multiple screens
• wayfarer - Screen recorder for GNOME
• wayrec - Experimental screen recorder for Wayland using the freedesktop ScreenCast portal
• wf-recorder - A utility program for screen recording of wlroots-based compositors (more specifically, those that support wlr-screencopy-v1 and xdg-output)
• wl-mirror - A simple Wayland output mirror client
• wl-screenrec - High performance wlroots screen recording, featuring hardware encoding
• wlrobs - An obs-studio plugin that allows you to screen capture on wlroots based wayland compositors
• wshowkeys - Displays keys being pressed on a Wayland session

Screenshots

• Flameshot - Powerful yet simple to use screenshot software (requires grim on wlroots)
• Grim - Grab images from a Wayland compositor
• ksnip - ksnip the cross-platform screenshot and annotation tool
• Shotman - Uncompromising screenshot GUI for Wayland compositors
• Slurp - Select a region in a Wayland compositor
• Spectacle - GUI application for capturing screenshots
• Swappy - A Wayland-native snapshot editing tool, inspired by Snappy on macOS
• Watershot - A simple wayland native screenshot tool inspired by Flameshot
• Wayshot - A screenshot tool for wlroots compositors implementing zwlr_screencopy_v1.
• Weye - A lightweight screenshot tool for sway users, written in Rust. This tool uses grimshot commands to screenshot

Session Management

• wlogout - A Wayland-based logout menu

Status Bars

• i3status-rust - Very resource-friendly and feature-rich replacement for i3status, written in pure Rust
• ironbar - A customisable and feature-rich GTK bar for wlroots compositors, written in Rust, supporting content-rich popoups.
• rootbar - Root Bar is a bar for wlroots based Wayland compositors such as sway
• sfwbar - Sway Floating Window Bar is a taskbar for Sway, focused on a stacking layout workflow
• waybar - Highly customizable Wayland bar for Sway and Wlroots based compositors
• yambar - Modular status panel for X11 and Wayland, inspired by polybar
• eww - Standalone widget system made in Rust that allows you to implement your own, custom widgets in any window manager.

Subtitle Editors

• Subtitle Composer - Current git builds include an ffmpeg-based video player fully Wayland native

Terminal Emulators

• Alacritty - A cross-platform, GPU-accelerated terminal emulator
• Ate - Awesome terminal emulator
• Foot - A fast, lightweight and minimalistic Wayland terminal emulator
• Germinal - Minimalist vte-based terminal emulator
• GNOME Terminal - A terminal emulator for GNOME
• Havoc - A minimal terminal emulator for Wayland
• Kitty - A cross-platform, fast, feature-full, GPU-based terminal emulator
• Konsole - Terminal emulator by KDE
• Termite - A keyboard-centric VTE-based terminal, aimed at use within a window manager with tiling and/or tabbing support (Termite is obsoleted by Alacritty!)
• wezterm - A GPU-accelerated cross-platform terminal emulator and multiplexer
• wterm - An st fork for wayland
• Xfce Terminal - A graphically-configurable terminal for Xfce

Text Editors

• FeatherPad - Lightweight and feature rich Qt plain-text editor
• Kate - Modern text editor built on the KDE Frameworks and Qt
• KWrite - Simple notepad-like editor based on Kate
• Nota - Maui's simple text editor for desktop and mobile

Tools

• lswt - List Wayland toplevels in both human readable and machine parsable formats
• waylevel - A simple debugging tool which lists compositor specific information.
• wev - A tool for debugging events on a Wayland window, analogous to the X11 tool xev
• wtype - A Wayland tool that allows you to simulate keyboard input like xdotool
• ydotool - A generic Linux command-line automation tool for Wayland

Video Players

• Haruna - Video player built with Qt/QML and libmpv
• mpv - Command line video player

Wallpaper

• mpvpaper - A video wallpaper program for wlroots based wayland compositors
• plasma-apply-wallpaperimage - A terminal utility to change wallpaper on Plasma
• swaybg - A wallpaper utility for Wayland compositors
• swww - A Solution to your Wayland Wallpaper Woes
• Wallutils - A set of utilities to manage monitors, resolutions, wallpapers and timed wallpapers
• waypaper - GUI frontend for swaybg/swww to switch wallpapers
• wpaperd - Wallpaper daemon that shows random wallpapers from a directory and changes them after some time
• wbg - Super simple wallpaper application for Wayland compositors

License