After the river 0.4 release I migrated from river-classic to kwm, recreating about the same design I’ve used for years now.
The image is a combination of three separate screenshots of the same screen. It shows a ‘fake-busy’ terminal (foot) based workflow featuring neovim, yazi, aerc, senpai and newsraft.
See https://codeberg.org/proycon/dotfiles for dotfiles
Looks good! How is kwm? Especially curious compared to river-classic, and if you’ve tried any other River WMs. I’m still on river-classic and hoping to move to 0.4 soon, but I need to decide on a WM first. Probably want something close to river-classic but some more programmability/extensibility would be nice.
I looked for something that was similar to river-classic, kwm seemed the most mature one, but they’re all very young of course. it’s heavily inspired on dwm (includes a similar bar too) and the the developer is quite responsive. I do ‘miss’ the riverctl-based way of configuration which I liked in river-classic, I believe only zrwm (https://sr.ht/~zuki/zrwm/) currently does that. I haven’t tried them all yet as some lacked features I need/want.
Sounds good. kwm and zrwm are on my shortlist. I’ve also seen tinyrwm and I’m heartened by how short the implementations are. I’ve been thinking about perhaps writing my own WM. I might take a read of tinyrwm to get an idea of what rolling my own might be like and give it a go.
I just watched the video about what’s going on with River from Brodie Robertson, cause i was very confused on why it became “river-classic” all of a sudden, but this new development looks really cool! River was already my favorite compositor so far, but i’ll definitely want to experiment with this new implementation and the window managers that exist for it.
I tried to find information on KWM. I only found Kawaii, which is X11-based.
This kwm: https://github.com/kewuaa/kwm
That’s certainly interesting. Basically, take what worked with River in the past, and keep improving upon that.
It’s just like BSPWM in a way.




