EWM - Emacs Wayland Manager
- Rust 89.4%
- Emacs Lisp 9.2%
- Nix 1.1%
- Shell 0.3%
EWM - Emacs Wayland Manager
Disclaimer: Writing a Wayland compositor from scratch is a staggering amount of work. I wanted to switch from EXWM as soon as possible, so the initial bootstrap was done with Claude, which helped a lot in reverse-engineering the brilliant niri codebase and surgically extracting the pieces relevant to EWM. Inherently, this means the codebase still needs validation and cleanup, which is the current priority.
What is EWM?
EWM is a Wayland compositor that runs inside Emacs. Wayland applications appear as Emacs buffers, letting you switch between code and apps with C-x b, organize windows with your familiar Emacs commands, and keep everything responsive even when Emacs is busy evaluating.
The compositor runs as a separate thread within Emacs (via a dynamic module), so applications never freeze waiting for Elisp evaluation.
┌─ Emacs Process ────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ Main Thread: Elisp execution │
│ ↑↓ shared memory, mutex-protected │
│ Compositor Thread: Smithay (Rust dynamic module) │
│ ↑↓ │
│ Render Thread: DRM/GPU │
└────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
Quick Start
cd compositor && cargo build --features=screencast
EWM_MODULE_PATH=$(pwd)/target/debug/libewm_core.so \
emacs --fg-daemon -L ../lisp -l ewm -f ewm-start-module
Launch apps with s-d. See the wiki for full setup, configuration, and NixOS instructions.
Current Features
- Wayland surfaces as Emacs buffers
- Automatic layout synchronization
- Per-output declarative layout (surfaces can span multiple outputs)
- Per-window fullscreen (XDG fullscreen protocol,
s-ftoggle) - Prefix key interception (compositor forwards to Emacs)
- Client-side decoration auto-disable
- DRM backend with multi-monitor support (hotplug, per-output Emacs frames)
- Lid close/open handling (laptop panel off when external monitor connected)
- Layer-shell protocol (waybar, notifications, etc.)
- Workspace protocol (ext-workspace-v1, tab-bar integration)
- Screen sharing via xdg-desktop-portal (PipeWire DMA-BUF)
- Input method support (type in any script via Emacs input methods)
- Clipboard integration with Emacs kill-ring as central hub
- Screen locking via ext-session-lock-v1 (swaylock)
- Idle notification via ext-idle-notify-v1 (swayidle)
- XDG activation (focus requests from apps)
- Fractional output scaling (1.25x, 1.5x, etc.)
Known Limitations
- GPU selection is automatic (no override)
- Must run from TTY (no nested mode)
Inspirations
- EXWM (Emacs side): Buffer-per-window model, prefix key interception, automatic focus management
- niri (Compositor side): Backend architecture, Smithay patterns, DRM abstraction
License
GPL-3.0