Swindle

"It's so bad it's not even funny!" -kantiankant, 2026

Swindle is a fork of dwl that was designed from the start with one goal: to make it feel like the poor man's Hyprland. It has the following:

• NO cool vfx
• nearly NO documentation
• ZERO good original code
• only ONE tiling layout (dwindle)

Fun fact: I actually took some parts of MangoWM (such as the ext-workspaces implementation). hence why the LICENSE.mangowm exists

Dependencies

• libinput
• wayland
• wlroots-0.20 (compiled with the libinput backend)
• xkbcommon
• wayland-protocols (compile-time only)
• pkg-config (compile-time only)
• meson (compile-time only)
• ninja (compile-time only)

Install these (and their -devel versions if your distro has separate development packages) and run meson setup build followed by doas/sudo ninja -C build install, if you wish to install it (installs to /usr/local/bin/ by default).

Things that are good to have

• foot

Known Issues

N/A

Configuration

read example/config.lua. It should give you a basic idea of how configuring swindle works.

note: it's best to copy /etc/swindle/config.lua into XDG_HOME_DIR/.config/swindle/ before you attempt to start swindle because it (swindle) won't start without it

Checklist

• separate the trackpad scroll from the mousee scroll
• Add ability to change your keymap
• Add animations via scenefx when 0.5 drops (in another branch)
• Add the ability for the compositor to read a custom path for configs
• Add /etc/swindle/config.lua as a fallback path if $HOME/.config/swindle/config.lua is not found

License

GPL-v3, probably