Sway

An i3-compatible Wayland compositor.

Sway is a tiling Wayland compositor that targets configuration compatibility with the i3 X11 window manager. Most i3 configs run unmodified under Sway, and the same key concepts (workspaces, containers, splits, tabbed groups) carry over. For users moving from X11 to Wayland this lowers the migration cost considerably.

The project is built on top of wlroots, the modular Wayland compositor library, and was created by Drew DeVault in 2016. DeVault stepped back as primary maintainer in 2024; the project is now maintained by a team. Sway implements all the standard Wayland protocols plus several wlroots-specific extensions used by tools like grim (screenshots), slurp (region picker), and swaybar (status bar).

Sway has become the default tiling Wayland compositor for many Arch, Fedora, and Debian users moving off X11, especially in dotfile communities that previously used i3. It is widely considered stable enough for daily use and benefits from wlroots's broader ecosystem of compositor improvements.

License: MIT

Category: Desktop

Website: https://swaywm.org/

Install

Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install sway
Fedora/RHEL:   sudo dnf install sway
Arch:          sudo pacman -S sway

Authors

Drew DeVault (creator)
Sway contributors

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