About

BMRWM is a simple scrolling window manager, built on the River compositor and written in Go.

I wrote it for my own personal use, so the featureset is limited to my own needs. The codebase is well documented and written to be easily modified, so feel free to fork the project and make it your own.

Features

• Infinite horizontal space for windows.
• Multi output support, including support for adding and removing outputs at runtime.
• Each output keeps its own strip of windows.
• Move windows and focus freely between outputs.
• Windows can be 50% width, maximized or fullscreen.
• Custom shell commands can be bound to keybinds.

Links

Docs

• River
• Protocol docs
• tinyrwm

Protocols & Reference

• River protocols
• Wayland protocols
• wlcl (Go Wayland client)
• xkbcommon-keysyms.h

Nix/NixOS

• Nix/NixOS
• Home Manager
• Flakes
• Direnv
• Personal dotfiles

Config

Keybinds, theme and monitor setup can be changed in ~/.config/bmrwm/config.json.

Check config.json for an example of a default config.

Nix/NixOS

The repository includes a Nix Flake for easy configuration through Home Manager.

For an implementation example, you can check out my own personal dotfiles.

Default binds

Building and running

Ensure you have the following dependencies installed:

• River 0.4.5 or later
• Go 1.26.3 or later

Then build and run it with:

go build -o bmrwm .

river -c ./bmrwm

For everyday use, I would recommend updating the ~/.config/river/init:

#!/bin/sh

# Launch BMRWM
# NOTE: Use your own path to the BMRWM binary.
bmrwm &

# Start Foot server
foot --server &

# Set wallpaper
while ! pgrep -x bmrwm >/dev/null; do
  sleep 0.1
done

swaybg -c "#45403D" &

Then bmrwm can be launched with river

Nix/NixOS

Ensure you have the following dependencies installed/enabled:

• Flakes
• Direnv

Run direnv allow once.

Then build and run it with:

nix build

river -c result/bin/bmrwm

Updating/adding protocols

To add protocols, verify the support in the protocol docs

Then copy them to ./protocol and run:

go generate ./internal/protocol