Useful add ons for sway

Here is a list of apps and scripts for Sway (and probably other Wayland compositors based on wlroots).

Note that pretty much all GTK and KDE apps such as firefox, thunderbird, chromium, even emacs (with the puregtk/emacs-28 branch) can be run as native wayland under sway so they're not listed here.

A collection of user-contributed scripts is available in sway-contrib.

An extensible Guile scheme bindings for sway with easy to configure modules to manage workspaces, nested keybindings, layouts, and events is available in guile-swayer.

[WIP] = Work in progress or alpha status

Login managers

⚠️ Notice: login managers are not officially supported by the Sway developers.

greetd - a minimal and flexible login manager daemon
- gtkgreet - a minimal gtk based login manager
- qtgreet - a fancy qt based login manager
- tuigreet - a simple graphical console login manager
- wlgreet - wayland login manager
- regreet - Clean and customizable greeter for greetd
emptty - dead simple CLI Display Manager on TTY
Ly - a lightweight TUI (ncurses-like) display manager
autologin - automatically logs into the configured user; perfect for computers with a single user and another method of startup authentication (like encrypted hard-drive)
uwsm - Universal Wayland Session Manager that wraps sway (or other compositors) into systemd units. Supports integrating into login shell, XDG autostart, environment management, launching applications in units. Extendable with plugins.

Launchers

Generic launchers for GTK or KDE such as xfce4-appfinder and krunner work fine but the following were written with sway in mind:

kickoff - application launcher with a focus on performance and low latency
~~lavalauncher - simple launcher for Wayland~~ (unmaintained)
nwg-launchers - a set of launchers: application grid, dynamic menu, button bar
Ulauncher - app launcher
wldash - A dashboard/launcher/control-panel thing for Wayland
yofi - minimalistic application launcher for wayland
gmenu - Desktop application launcher
mauncher - Mauncher is a GTK-based alternative to dmenu for Wayland which supports display scaling
fuzzel - application launcher, similar to rofi's drun mode
term-dmenu - Replace dmenu with a floating terminal and FZF
sirula - Simple app launcher for Wayland written in Rust
onagre - A pop-launcher based application launcher for wayland and X.

Menus

wofi - A rofi inspired menu and launcher for wlroots compositors
bemenu - dmenu replacement with Wayland support
tofi - Tiny dynamic menu for Wayland
wlogout - A wayland based logout menu wlogout
wayland fork of rofi - fork of Rofi with added support for Wayland. Acts as a window switcher, application launcher, ssh launcher, etc. and has a large amount of community-made themes, plugins and user scripts available
dmenu-wl - an efficient dynamic menu for wayland (wlroots).
sway-launcher-desktop - a TUI-based launcher menu made with bash and the amazing fzf
i3-menu - menu generated from bindsym for learning sway keystrokes and remembering obscure ones (was 'sway-menu' but now also runs on i3wm)
sway-mode - Head-up-display (HUD) help while running 'modes' such as 'move-mode'
sway-fzfify - a series of scripts which FZFify your sway desktop.
waylogout - a graphical logout/suspend/reboot/shutdown dialog inspired by oblogout and based on code from swaylock-effects.
wlr-which-key - Keymap manager for wlroots-based compositors in Rust.
sway-yasm - Manage windows, workspaces, outputs, clipboard and PATH using FZF.

Display/outputs

wob - A lightweight overlay volume/backlight/progress/anything bar for Wayland.
mywob - autostarts wob(1)
wdisplays - GUI display configurator for wlroots compositors [like arandr(1)] (Mirror since the upstream has been deleted)
wlr-randr - manage outputs of a Wayland compositor.
wlay - Graphical output management for Wayland
kanshi - define output profiles that are automatically enabled and disabled on hotplug. eg, this can be used to turn a laptop's internal screen off when docked.
swayrst - Save and restore your outputs, workspaces and windows
persway - a simple sway ipc daemon
fade - Have new windows fade in gradually. This script is alpha (get it;)) at best, you may encounter issues.
way-displays - Manage Your Wayland Displays
nwg-displays - Output management utility for sway Wayland compositor, inspired by wdisplays and wlay.
shikane - A dynamic output configuration tool that automatically detects and configures connected outputs based on a set of profiles.

Image viewers

pqiv - A powerful GTK 3 based command-line image viewer with a minimal UI.
imv - imv is a command line image viewer intended for use with tiling window managers.
mvi - A command line image viewer utilizing mpv
ucollage - An extensible command line image viewer inspired by vim.
swayimg - image viewer for Sway/Wayland
vimiv - An image viewer with vim-like keybindings.

TIP: The kitty terminal emulator has a built-in image viewer, icat.

TIP: ueberzugpp has tmux support on sway.

Video Players

mpv - Command line video player

Notification

mako - A lightweight notification daemon for Wayland.
fnott - Keyboard driven and lightweight Wayland notification daemon
dunst - a highly configurable and lightweight notification daemon.
wayherb - Wayland notifcation port of herbe - daemon-less notifications without D-Bus. Minimal and lightweight.
swaync - A simple notification daemon with a notification center built with GTK
salut - Animated mouse centric notification daemon

Workspaces

workstyle - dynamically rename your workspaces to indicate which programs are running in each one.
sworkstyle - The main difference between this and workstyle is that this supports exact app names instead of only generic titles.
wsdnames.py - automatically renames workspace title
swaysome - manage workspaces namespaced on a per-screen basis, like awesome wm.
swaywsr - sway workspace renamer, a port of i3wsr for Sway written in Rust.
swaymsg_workspace - reorder, switch, rename workspaces. (written in Rust)

Overview

sov - Similar to i3-overview: An overlay that shows schemas for all workspaces to make navigation in sway easier.

Layouts

autotiling - switch the layout splith/splitv depending on the currently focused window dimensions.
swaymonad - an auto-tiler that implements Xmonad-like layouts.
papersway - PaperWM-style scrollable window management for Sway/i3wm

Screenshot

grim - grab images from a Wayland compositor
grimshot - script to grab regions from the window. (doesn't take screenshots by itself).
slurp - select a region in a Wayland compositor
screenshot-bash - screenshot - upload - copy-url pipeline
snag - snag screenshots and screencasts with Rofi
swappy - screen snapshot & editor
swayshot - Print screen helper for sway adds keyboard shortcuts for screenshots
shotman - takes a screenshot and shows a small thumbnail with basic actions.
taiga - an animated screenshot program
wayshot - A native screenshot tool for wlroots based compositors such as sway and river written in Rust.
flameshot - Powerful yet simple to use screenshot software
sway-screenshot - Utility to easily take screenshot in swaywm using your mouse
hyprpicker - A wlroots-compatible Wayland color picker

Brightness

brightnessctl - control device brightness
~~light - control backlights~~ (unmaintained) (archived)
clight - a C user daemon utility that aims to fully manage your display (And a GUI for it clight-gui )
wluma - automatically adjusts screen brightness based on the screen contents and amount of ambient light around you
brillo - controls the brightness of backlight and LED devices on Linux.
wlr-brightness - adjust the brightness of your screen
wl-gammarelay - a daemon with D-Bus interface to control display color temperature and brightness
wl-gammarelay-rs - a daemon with D-Bus interface to control display color temperature and brightness written in Rust

Gamma

wl-gammactl - Small GTK GUI application to set contrast, brightness and gamma
gammastep - Adjust the color temperature of your screen
wlsunset - Day/night gamma adjustments for Wayland
wl-gammarelay - a daemon with D-Bus interface to control display color temperature and brightness
wl-gammarelay-rs - a daemon with D-Bus interface to control display color temperature and brightness written in Rust

Colorscheme

darkman framework for dark-mode and light-mode transitions, implementing org.freedesktop.appearance.color-scheme

Wallpaper

swaybg - Wallpaper tool
azote - Wallpaper and colour manager for Sway, i3 and some other WMs
wallutils - wallpaper manager
glpaper - wallpaper program that allows you to render glsl shaders as your wallpaper
mpvpaper - wallpaper program that allows you to play videos with mpv as your wallpaper
qt-video-wlr - Qt5 video player
~~oguri - A very nice animated wallpaper daemon~~ (archived and unmaintained)
sunpaper - a linux utility to change wallpaper based on local sunrise and sunset times.
wpaperd - Wallpaper daemon for Wayland that can change the wallpaper after a fixed time.
swww - A Solution to your Wayland Wallpaper Woes.
wsbg - Wallpaper tool with per-workspace configuration
wbg - Super simple wallpaper application for Wayland compositors implementing the layer-shell protocol
waypaper - GUI wallpaper manager for both Wayland and Xorg window managers
Waypaper-Engine - A graphical frontend for setting wallpapers and playlists, using swww under the hood!
WAT - A console based wallpaper changer made in Lua, for sway

Bars & panels

swaybar - default bar for sway
waybar - Highly customizable Wayland bar for Sway
yambar - is a lightweight and configurable status panel
rootbar - a bar for wlroots based wayland compositors such as sway
rwaybar - a bar with configurable widgets and transparent overlay support
wapanel - Simple panel for Wayland with decent XFCE-like applets
sfwbar - Sway Floating Window Bar is a taskbar for Sway, focused on a stacking layout workflow
nwg-shell - a 'shell' for wl-roots including various other nwg-* components listed here
nwg-panel - GTK-based panel, inspired by Waybar and tint2
nwg-dock - Fully configurable dock featuring pinned buttons, task buttons, the workspace switcher and the launcher button.
nwg-menu - Menu for nwg-shell
nwg-drawer - a launcher for nwg-shell
nwg-bar - a simple button bar for nwg-shell
nwg-wrapper - display text or images on any layer (eg root)

Bar content generators

swayrbar - swayrbar is a status command for sway's swaybar implementing the swaybar-protocol
i3status - Status bar generator for i3bar, dzen2, xmobar or similar programs
i3blocks - A feed generator for text based status bars (yes, it works fine with swaybar!)
luastatus - Universal status bar content generator
i3status-rs - a feature-rich and resource-friendly replacement for i3status, written in pure Rust. It provides a way to display "blocks" of system information (time, battery status, volume, etc) on the i3 bar. It is also compatible with sway.
gopsuinfo - prints system usage information as text for Waybar custom modules or icon/text for nwg-panel executors
statusbar - A fully-featured, customizable, extensible, and well-documented content generator for swaybar/i3bar. It offers a variety of widgets, allows for integration with other generators (listed above), and makes it easy to implement your own widgets using Go.
swaybar-commander - A status command for swaybar that uses the swaybar-protocol to independently update user-defined content blocks

Widgets

AGS (Aylur's Gtk Shell) - This is a library built for GJS (Gnome JavaScript) to allow defining GTK widgets in a declarative way.
Eww - a standalone widget system made in Rust that allows you to implement your own, custom widgets
Gsimplecal - a lightweight calendar applet written in C++ using GTK.
wlclock - a digital analog clock for Wayland desktops.
wlr-sunclock - a desktop widget to show to the sun's shadows on earth.

Other shell components

wlhc (Wayland hot corners) - execute a command when the pointer touches a corner of the screen.

Keyboard/Input

swhkd - sxhkd clone for Wayland (works on TTY and X11 too)
wev - event debugging similar to xev for X11
wshowkeys - display keypresses (fork with fixes for recent wlroots versions, original here)
keyd - A key remapping daemon for linux.
dotool - Command to simulate input anywhere (X11/Wayland/TTYs) [like xdotool(1)]
ydotool - Generic command-line automation tool (no X!) [like xdotool(1)]
myautotype - Hot-keys using ydotool/wtype/xdotools possibly looking up a key-value pair from ~/.config/myautotype
wtype - xdotool type for wayland
clipman - A basic clipboard manager for Wayland, with support for persisting copy buffers after an application exits.
copyq - full function clipboard manager (but requires the full KDE/Qt stack)
cliphist - clipboard history “manager” for wayland (including images) - requires golang-1.16 to build
lisgd - bind gestures on touchscreens, and unsupported gesture devices via libinput touch events
wl-clipboard - Wayland clipboard utilities, wl-copy and wl-paste, to copy data between the clipboard and Unix pipes, sockets, files etc
wl-clipboard-history - Wayland clipboard history tracker
clipmon - preserves the clipboard and notifies when an application pastes (for security)
swaykbdd - per-window keyboard layout for Sway
i3keys - lists all the keys that are bound to some action in i3 or sway
swaynagmode - programmatic control over swaynag, intended for use with keyboard bindings
sway-alttab - simple daemon that keeps track of your last focused window and switches to it on receiving a SIGUSR1. Automatically binds Alt-Tab to the same action.
wlrctl - command line utility for miscellaneous wlroots Wayland extensions (similar to xdotool). WARNING: requires sway-1.6+
waynergy - [WIP] implementation of a synergy client for wlroots compositors
swayr - A urgent-first/LRU window and workspace switcher usable with launcher/menu programs such as wofi.
wl-clip-persist - Keep Wayland clipboard even after programs close
sway-input-config - Input device configurator for Sway, written on Qt/Python
sway-overfocus - Customizable basic focus commands, so you can navigate between splits while skipping past tabs and stacks.

Input Method Editors

kime - [WIP] Korean IME
wlanthy - [WIP] simple Wayland-native Japanese input method based on anthy
anthywl - [WIP] Japanese input method for sway based on anthy
wlhangul - [WIP] A Hangul input method for Wayland.
wlpinyin - [WIP] experimental minimal wayland IME for Chinese
wlchewing - [WIP] Wayland Chinese zhuyin input method with libchewing
fcitx5 - generic input method framework released under LGPL-2.1+

On-screen keyboards

squeekboard - Librem5 keyboard
wvkbd - On-screen keyboard for wlroots that sucks less

Idle timeout

inhibridge - Maps org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver to logind sleep inhibition
swayidle - An idle daemon for wayland compositors
wayidle - Wait for a single idle timeout

Locking

swaylock - a screen locking utility for Wayland compositors
Waylock - a simple screenlocker for wayland compositors.
swaylock-effects - a fork of swaylock which adds built-in screenshots and image manipulation effects like blurring
mylock - configure swaylock for various use-cases - safe, at-home, movie modes plus auto downloading of images
chayang - gradually dim the screen
swaydim - Dims your display using brightnessctl
swaylock-plugin - a fork of swaylock which can use existing wallpaper programs to draw the lockscreen background
gtklock - screen locker with modules for userinfo (incl. photo), powerbar, mpris media controls, others

Terminals

Alacritty - A fast, cross-platform, OpenGL terminal emulator
foot - A fast, lightweight and minimalistic Wayland terminal emulator
gnome-terminal - gnome's terminal
kitty - fast, featureful, GPU based terminal emulator
Konsole - KDE's Terminal Emulator
sakura - Simple but powerful libvte based terminal emulator
roxterm - terminal emulator intended to provide similar features to gnome-terminal, based on the same VTE library
wezterm - GPU-accelerated cross-platform terminal emulator and multiplexer written by @wez and implemented in Rust
Ate - Awesome terminal emulator
Germinal - Minimalist vte-based terminal emulator
Havoc - A minimal terminal emulator for Wayland
wterm - An st fork for wayland

VNC/RDP/SPICE

wayvnc - VNC server for wlroots
wlvncc - Wayland VNC Client (WIP)
connections - Wayland VNC/RDP client - not quite feature complete in released version 3.38 eg no full-screen, buggy config GUI. 3.40 may fix that when released.
remotely - wayland VNC client - abandoned by author in favour of connections.
vncviewer - VNC client - fast, full featured, stable - but uses XWayland.
vinagre - Wayland VNC/RDP client. VNC support is rather slow.
remmina - Wayland VNC/RDP/SPICE client. VNC support is rather slow.
krdc - Wayland VNC/RDP client. AVOID - does not support sway workspaces and took my session down!! Version 20.08.1
freerdp - Wayland RDP client (wlfreerdp) which is pretty fast (but needs the -grab-keyboard option to work with sway). Also xfreerdp, a fast XWayland RDP client. Tested against xrdp X11 server. Is there a 'wayrdp' server out there?

Remote/recording

Misc. Scripts

i3-fit-floats - fits floating windows into workspace (was 'sway-fit-floats' but now also runs on i3wm)
i3-focus - focus an app by name (sway app_id or X11 class) (was 'sway-focus' but now also runs on i3wm)
sway-prep-xwayland - prepare for Xwayland
i3-prop - show apps properties (similar to xprop) (was 'sway-prop' but now also runs on i3wm)
i3-run-or-raise - focus an existing app or run it otherwise (was 'sway-run-or-raise' but now also runs on i3wm)
sway-select-window - use bemenu/rofi/wofi to go to a running app
sway-start - startup sway from the console
i3-track-firefox - watch firefox (and other apps) and bind Shift-Insert to paste PRIMARY selection (was 'i3-track-firefox' but now also runs on i3wm)
i3-track-prev-focus - mark container with _prev for rapid switching between apps; also make unfocused windows translucent (was 'sway-track-prev-focus' but now also runs on i3wm)
nmcli-rofi - Wofi script to select wifi and VPNs with nmcli
sway-new-workspace - create bindings for opening a new workspace, or moving windows to a new workspace
swaycons - display window icons with font icons
sway-font-awesome - Font Awesome icons in sway's title bars.
i3-toolwait - serialise apps - similar to the ancient SunOS command toolwait (was 'sway-toolwait' but now also runs on i3wm)
vim-sway-nav - Seamless navigation between Sway windows and (Neo)Vim splits with the same key bindings

Development

gtk-layer-shell - A library to write GTK applications that use Layer Shell.
client toolkit - A toolkit for writing Wayland clients in Rust
swc - A library for making a simple Wayland compositor
wlroots - Pluggable, composable, unopinionated modules for building a Wayland compositor

Sources

Contributing

If you have improvements, please post to r/swaywm

Criteria for inclusion (tentative):

it's on one of the source lists
it's mentioned on /r/swaywm
it's open source ie unencumbered by a restricted licence
it runs on Linux or BSD
it adds something to the Sway experience