River is a wlroots based Wayland compositor written in Zig. Unlike other Wayland compositors, River does not bundle the window manager with the compositor and requires an external window manager that supports the river-window-management-v1 protocol.[3][4]
| River | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Original author | Isaac Freund |
| Release | November 3, 2021[1] |
| Stable release | 0.3.12
/ August 30, 2025[2] |
| Written in | Zig |
| Operating system | Unix-like |
| Type | Window manager |
| License | GPL 3.0 |
| Website | isaacfreund |
Features
edit- Configuration via the riverctl command-line tool.[5]
- The user can choose how the windows tile by writing their own window manager or choosing a preexisting one. A default generator called rivertile is provided[4]
- Windows can float.[4]
- Supports scratchpads.[4]
- Hot swapping window managers.[6]
References
edit- ↑ River Initial Release, River, retrieved 2026-02-27
- ↑ River Latest Release, River, 2025-08-30, retrieved 2026-02-27
- ↑ "river". isaacfreund.com. Retrieved 2026-02-27.
- 1 2 3 4 "river - ArchWiki". wiki.archlinux.org. Retrieved 2026-02-27.
- ↑ "River - Gentoo wiki". wiki.gentoo.org. Retrieved 2026-02-27.
- ↑ river. "river". Codeberg.org. Retrieved 2026-02-27.