Emacs

612 readers

1 users here now

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

Ategon@programming.dev

therealemilioestevez@programming.dev

Reka – Emacs Wayland window manager (codeberg.org)

submitted 1 month ago by flamingos@feddit.uk to c/emacs@programming.dev

3 comments fedilink hide all child comments

reka lets emacs' logic just flow into river. It is a window manager inside of Emacs for the Wayland world.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] tal@lemmy.today 1 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Oh, this is neat.

I do kind of wish that there was more of a summary of how it works on the page from a user standpoint. For example, the page links to niri, which the author previously used. That describes the basic niri paradigm right up top:

Windows are arranged in columns on an infinite strip going to the right. Opening a new window never causes existing windows to resize.

Every monitor has its own separate window strip. Windows can never "overflow" onto an adjacent monitor.

Workspaces are dynamic and arranged vertically. Every monitor has an independent set of workspaces, and there's always one empty workspace present all the way down.

The workspace arrangement is preserved across disconnecting and connecting monitors where it makes sense. When a monitor disconnects, its workspaces will move to another monitor, but upon reconnection they will move back to the original monitor.

I mean, you can very quickly skim that and get a rough idea of the way niri would work if you invested the time to download it and get it set up and use it.

It does say that reka uses river, and maybe that implies certain conventions or functionality, but I haven't used any river-based window managers, so it doesn't give me a lot of information.

[–] tazjin@programming.dev 3 points 1 month ago

Hi, I'm the author of this.

There's currently very little user-facing documentation; in general you can imagine it to work approximately the same way as EXWM. Wayland windows (e.g. your browser) just become another buffer inside of a full-screen Emacs frame, and then you use the normal Emacs window management paradigm.

This project is pretty new (river 0.4.0 just came out, and I wrote this originally two weeks ago, with last week being the first week where it was actually usable). There's a few more things I want to implement and clean up before I focus on making it more usable, right now the early users are mostly experienced EXWM-users and so on, i.e. people who don't really require any hand-holding. I think it makes sense to put off the "user-friendliness" until there's a certain level of polish and stability in the core features.

[–] flamingos@feddit.uk 2 points 1 month ago

From what I understand, River aims to separate the compositor programme from the window management programme, sort of like how things worked in X11. River's author gave a good introduction to it here.