BSD Ports

x11-wm/dwl 0.9 DragonFly

dwm for Wayland

System
DragonFly
Repository
DPorts
Maintainer
[email protected] (as in FreeBSD)
License
CC0-1.0, GPLv3+, MIT
Categories
wayland, x11-wm
Package size
49.5 KiB, 142.7 KiB installed

Description

dwl is a compact, hackable compositor for Wayland based on wlroots. It is intended to fill the same space in the Wayland world that dwm does in X11, primarily in terms of philosophy, and secondarily in terms of functionality. Like dwm, dwl is:

  • Easy to understand, hack on, and extend with patches
  • One C source file (or a very small number) configurable via config.h
  • Limited to 2200 SLOC to promote hackability
  • Tied to as few external dependencies as possible

dwl is not meant to provide every feature under the sun. Instead, like dwm, it sticks to features which are necessary, simple, and straightforward to implement given the base on which it is built. Implemented default features:

  • Any features provided by dwm/Xlib: simple window borders, tags, keybindings, client rules, mouse move/resize. Providing a built-in status bar is an exception to this goal, to avoid dependencies on font rendering and/or drawing libraries when an external bar could work well.
  • Configurable multi-monitor layout support, including position and rotation
  • Configurable HiDPI/multi-DPI support
  • Idle-inhibit protocol which lets applications such as mpv disable idle monitoring
  • Provide information to external status bars via stdout/stdin
  • Urgency hints via xdg-activate protocol
  • Support screen lockers via ext-session-lock-v1 protocol
  • Various Wayland protocols
  • XWayland support as provided by wlroots (can be enabled in config.mk)
  • Zero flickering - Wayland users naturally expect "every frame is perfect"
  • Layer shell popups (used by Waybar)
  • Damage tracking provided by scenegraph API

In the other systems

The newest version among them is 0.9, as upstream numbers it.

SystemPortVersionVulnerabilitiesStatusMaintainerLast update
DragonFlyx11-wm/dwl0.9 newestnone known-[email protected]-
FreeBSDx11-wm/dwl0.9 newestnone known-[email protected]2026-09-24
HardenedBSDx11-wm/dwl0.9 newestno data-[email protected]-
GhostBSDx11-wm/dwl0.9 newestno data-[email protected]-

Version history 1

  1. 0.9

Upstream's version as each commit to the port's Makefile set it, or as this site first saw it in the system's packages; the tree's own revisions are not versions here.

Install

Binary package:

pkg install dwl

From DPorts:

cd /usr/dports/x11-wm/dwl && make install clean

Dependency graph

Ports that need it on the left, what it needs to run on the right; at most 8 of each. "Dependencies" below lists them all.

Dependencies

Run dependencies 8

No port depends on this one.