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In The future of Wayland, and Sway's role in itswaywm
sway
C2015–2026
swaywm / sway
sway
i3-compatible Wayland compositor
93Distinct people
106Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
17.5KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
i3-compatible Wayland compositor
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
I really love the syntax and performance of fish shell, I had a few bash scripts that were used to manage the system volume notifications and power/battery information, as I…
L0stLink used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
- ammen99/wf-recorder · linked in 2 of the same discussions
- emersion/grim · linked in 2 of the same discussions
- swaywm/wlroots · linked in 2 of the same discussions
Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 11:34:28 AM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year106 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2015-08-16 19:36:44 UTC to 2026-03-20 13:37:33 UTC.
* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 10 | 1 | 9 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 10 | 0 | 10 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 2 | 2 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 16 | 1 | 15 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 21 | 2 | 19 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 13 | 1 | 12 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 10 | 1 | 9 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 10 | 0 | 10 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 7 | 5 | 2 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 1 | 2 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
From the project README
An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.
Read the project’s introduction
sway
English - عربي - Azərbaycanca - Česky - Deutsch - Dansk - Español - Français - ქართული - Ελληνικά - हिन्दी - Magyar - فارسی - Italiano - 日本語 - 한국어 - Nederlands - Norsk - Polski - Português - Română - Русский - Српски - Svenska - Türkçe - Українська - 中文-简体 - 中文-繁體
sway is an i3-compatible Wayland compositor. Read the FAQ. Join the
IRC channel (#sway on irc.libera.chat).
Release Signatures
Releases are signed with E88F5E48 and published on GitHub.
Installation
From Packages
Sway is available in many distributions. Try installing the "sway" package for
yours.
Compiling from Source
Check out this wiki page if you want to build the HEAD of
sway and wlroots for testing or development.
Install dependencies:
meson *
wlroots
wayland
wayland-protocols *
pcre2
json-c
pango
cairo
gdk-pixbuf2 (optional: additional image formats for system tray)
swaybg (optional: wallpaper)
scdoc (optional: man pages) *
git (optional: version info) *
* Compile-time dep
Run these commands:
meson setup build/
ninja -C build/
sudo ninja -C build/ install
Configuration
If you already use i3, then copy your i3 config to ~/.config/sway/config and
it'll work out of the box. Otherwise, copy the sample configuration file to
~/.config/sway/config. It is usually located at /etc/sway/config.
Run man 5 sway for information on the configuration.
Running
Run sway from a TTY or from a display manager.
Read the full README on GitHubWhat Hacker News says
10 sourcesFrom what I can tell, there are issues both with sway and alacritty that lead to the current incompatibility.
https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty/issues/97
https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/1390
https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/1054
From what I gather, alacritty and its window system abstraction layers (glutin & winit) are still somewhat immature w.r.t. their wayland support and that sway, due to the limited nature of its wlc layer, do not quite meet in the middle. As stated in TFA, sway is moving toward a more capable wlroots foundation. And the rust-based alacritty ecosystem is also moving forward with tremendous pace. I have little doubt that class of incompatibility will not exist much longer.
Given the newness of not just wayland, but also alacritty, glutin/winit, rust, and sway, I remain astonished that they work as well as
Read the rest
they do. But make no mistake, wayland is new tech and thus has some sharp corners where X11 is a well-established quantity after 30 years of existence.
Fear not, friend. There's a very active port of i3 to wayland: https://github.com/SirCmpwn/sway
I haven't personally tried it, but I have heard about it a few times, so I assume it's fairly good. This is the list of supported features, if you are interested: https://github.com/SirCmpwn/sway/issues/2
In Way Cooler tiling window managerSway (basically i3) I actually used for quite a while as my daily driver and it works great. Another one I want to check out soon is Way Cooler.
https://github.com/SirCmpwn/sway
https://github.com/way-cooler/way-cooler
In An introduction to WaylandInteresting article, nice to see some more practical examples.
For those unaware, SirCmpwn is responsible for sway - https://github.com/SirCmpwn/sway - which aims to be an i3 compatible compositor for Wayland. In my experience it's not production ready yet, but it's definitely a pretty cool project to keep an eye on if you do use i3.
In An introduction to WaylandIf I understand correctly, they've implemented a new wayland protocol (extension?) https://github.com/SirCmpwn/sway/blob/master/protocols/gamma...
In Night Shift compared to f.luxRecent versions of Sway, the i3-compatible Wayland compositor, work with a patched Redshift: https://github.com/SirCmpwn/sway/releases/tag/0.12
In Gnome 3.24 (with Night Light) ReleasedAfter ratpoison, there was a spiritual successor called stumpwm that is actively developed. [1]
Unfortunately, with most distros going to Wayland, it seems most window managers are going the way of the dodo. Very few have a sane migration path; Wayland's idea of what a compositor (the closest analog to window manager) does is pretty different. It's not like a libxcb/libx11 analog is a sane endeavor. I've found one thing that's a reimplementation of an existing, popular tiling window manager (i3): sway. [2]
I'll miss hacking the good hack.
[1]: https://github.com/stumpwm/stumpwm
[2]: https://github.com/SirCmpwn/sway
In The Antidesktop (2002)If you're on Wayland, use Sway instead. It feels so much like i3 that I often forget it's not i3. Hidpi works pretty well: https://github.com/SirCmpwn/sway/issues/797. I use this on a Dell Precision with the 4k display.
In Do we really need swap on modern systems?There's a bounty for that feature: https://github.com/SirCmpwn/sway/issues/986
Why don't you work on it?
In StumpWM 1.0 Released