Sway

Sway is a tiling Wayland compositor and a drop-in replacement for the i3 window manager, written in C and based on wlroots. Created by Drew DeVault in 2016 and now maintained by Simon Ser and the Sway community, Sway has over 14,700 stars as of 2026. Sway aims to provide the exact same user experience as i3wm but running natively on Wayland, meaning existing i3 configuration files and scripts work without modification. Key features include: full i3 compatibility (configuration syntax, keybindings, commands, IPC interface, and behavior are identical to i3, enabling seamless migration from X11 to Wayland), manual tiling layout (container-based tree model supporting horizontal and vertical splits, tabbed and stacked layouts, and floating windows), workspace management (named and numbered workspaces with per-output workspace assignment, workspace back-and-forth toggling, and urgent workspace detection), input configuration (keyboard layouts and variants, repeat rate and delay, pointer acceleration, touchpad tap-to-click and natural scrolling, and per-device configuration matching by type or identifier), output configuration (resolution, refresh rate, position, scale, transform for rotation, adaptive sync/VRR, and background wallpaper via swaybg), gaps support (inner and outer gaps between and around containers), IPC interface (i3-compatible JSON-RPC over Unix socket, enabling integration with i3blocks, i3status, waybar, and custom scripts), XWayland support (running legacy X11 applications under Wayland via XWayland), and security (Sway runs applications with reduced privileges by default, preventing keylogging and screen recording by untrusted applications).