Oct 23, 2026, 6:04 PM

For my sins, I sometimes have to use a MacBook, and for X11, Xquartz has been a god-sent as it allows me to run an X11 WM and have it appear on MacOS.

But there isn't an equivalent of that for wayland. So I've started to write one. Only this one is based on River's protocols. You can see a screenshot of it attached.

What this means is that any WM which uses #river as its compositor should work with this, assuming it can be ported to #macOS

Specifically I'm referring to the ability if having the wayland compositor render its windows as the WM intended.

It's still a WIP, but things look promising thus far. The core of it is writen in Rust, which is a language I've been wanting to try. The Apple-specific "shim" which allows windows to appear non-natively is written in Objective-C.

I suck at both languages, so I suspect many errors, but so far, I'm liking the progress I'm making...

I'll try and get this code published over the weekend, or early next week.

I've been chipping away at this for many months, so it'll be incomplete. But I do have some XWayland support already working, hence the #xterm screenshot.