Thomas Adam, the creator of the FVWM3 window manager and a key developer of FVWM, along with the maintainer of the portable version of the terminal multiplexer tmux, has released the CoW (Compositor on Wayland) project. This aims to create a stacked window manager in the style of FVWM and MWM, utilizing the Wayland protocol instead of X11. Notably, it features a simpler configuration mechanism, where instead of a complicated configuration syntax, a command set similar to tmux commands is used, applicable in both the configuration file and the IPC interface for remote management. The code is written in C and is distributed under the ISC license. Builds are being created for Arch Linux, Fedora, and OpenBSD.
CoW is implemented on top of a modular compositor server River, which is responsible for implementing the Wayland protocol, rendering, and managing access for input and output.
CoW includes abstractions for window management, IPC, commands, and capabilities for stacked placement, decoding, and composing windows. This separation has allowed a focus on window management functions without getting distracted by the intricacies of the Wayland protocol.
On top of the window manager, the cowbar panel, cow-appmenu application menu, cowpager virtual desktop navigator, cowbuttons launcher, and cowiconman window list viewing interface run. Instead of the built-in panel, the Waybar panel can be used. Version 0.4 of CoW is notable for adding the ability to use top-level window containers for creating arbitrary window layouts on the screen (a top-level window can be divided into columns and rows, with sizes changing independently of each other).
Source: opennet.ru
