Maomaowm

This project's development is based on dwl.

"Since many people have asked about the meaning of this compositor's name, 'Maomao' is an online alias I've been using for years - it comes from the first two characters of the Chinese word for 'caterpillar' (毛毛虫). You can basically think of it as meaning 'caterpillar'.

1. Lightweight & Fast Build

   • Maomao is as lightweight as dwl, and can be built completely within a few seconds. Despite this, Maomao does not compromise on functionality.

2. Feature Highlights

   • In addition to basic WM functionality, Maomao provides:
     • Excellent xwayland support.
     • Base tags not workspaces (supports separate window layouts for each tag)
     • Smooth and customizable complete animations (window open/move/close, tag enter/leave,layer open/close/move)
     • Excellent input method support (text input v2/v3)
     • Flexible window layouts with easy switching (scroller, master, monocle, spiral, etc.)
     • Rich window states (swallow, minimize, maximize, unglobal, global, fakefullscreen, overlay, etc.)
     • Simple yet powerful external configuration
     • Sway-like scratchpad and named scratchpad
     • Minimize window to scratchpad
     • Hycov-like overview
     • Window effects from scenefx (blur, shadow, corner radius, opacity)

3. Some disadvantages

   • Since it uses the fully automatic layout like dwm style, it does not allow you to manually adjust the window size when the window is in tiled state. It only allows you to change the layout parameters to adjust the window ratio.

Master-Stack Layout

2025-02-19.16-30-01.mp4

Scroller Layout

2025-02-19.16-31-46.mp4

Layer animaiton

2025-07-12.15-15-53.mp4

Supported layouts

• Tile
• Scroller
• Monocle
• Grid
• Dwindle
• Spiral
• Deck

Installation

Dependencies

• glibc
• wayland
• wayland-protocols
• libinput
• libdrm
• libxkbcommon
• pixman
• git
• meson
• ninja
• libdisplay-info
• libliftoff
• hwdata
• seatd
• pcre2

Arch Linux

yay -S maomaowm-git

Gentoo Linux

The package is in the community-maintained repository called GURU. First, add GURU repository:

emerge --ask --verbose eselect-repository
eselect repository enable guru
emerge --sync guru

Then, add gui-libs/scenefx and gui-wm/maomaowm to the package.accept_keywords.

Finally, install the package:

emerge --ask --verbose gui-wm/maomaowm

Patching wlroots is done by getting the patch with git from the repository and then copying it to /etc/portage/patches/gui-libs/wlroots/.

Other

# wlroots 0.19.0 release with a fix-patch to avoid crash
git clone https://github.com/DreamMaoMao/wlroots.git
cd wlroots
meson build -Dprefix=/usr
sudo ninja -C build install

git clone https://github.com/wlrfx/scenefx.git
cd scenefx
meson build -Dprefix=/usr
sudo ninja -C build install

git clone https://github.com/DreamMaoMao/maomaowm.git
cd maomaowm
meson build -Dprefix=/usr
sudo ninja -C build install

Suggested Tools

• Application launcher (rofi-wayland, bemenu, wmenu, fuzzel)
• Terminal emulator (foot, wezterm, alacritty, kitty, ghostty)
• Status bar (waybar, eww, quickshell, ags), waybar is preferred
• Wallpaper setup (swww, swaybg)
• Notification daemon (swaync, dunst,mako)
• Desktop portal (xdg-desktop-portal, xdg-desktop-portal-wlr, xdg-desktop-portal-gtk)
• Clipboard (wl-clipboard, wl-clip-persist, cliphist)
• Gamma control/night light (wlsunset, gammastep)
• Miscellaneous (xfce-polkit, wlogout)

Some Common Default Keybindings

• alt+return: open foot terminal
• alt+q: kill client
• alt+left/right/up/down: focus direction
• super+m: quit maomao

My Dotfiles

• Dependencies

yay -S rofi-wayland foot xdg-desktop-portal-wlr swaybg waybar wl-clip-persist cliphist wl-clipboard wlsunset xfce-polkit swaync pamixer lavalauncher-mao-git wlr-dpms sway-audio-idle-inhibit-git swayidle dimland-git brightnessctl swayosd wlr-randr grim slurp satty swaylock-effects-git wlogout

• use my config

git clone https://github.com/DreamMaoMao/maomao-config.git ~/.config/maomao

Config Documentation

Refer to the wiki

NixOS + Home-manager

The repo contains a flake that provides a NixOS module and a home-manager module for maomaowm. Use the NixOS module to install maomaowm with other necessary components of a working Wayland environment. Use the home-manager module to declare configuration and autostart for maomaowm.

Here's an example of using the modules in a flake:

{
  inputs = {
    nixpkgs.url = "github:NixOS/nixpkgs/nixos-unstable";
    home-manager = {
      url = "github:nix-community/home-manager";
      inputs.nixpkgs.follows = "nixpkgs";
    };
    flake-parts.url = "github:hercules-ci/flake-parts";
    maomaowm.url = "github:DreamMaoMao/maomaowm";
  };
  outputs =
    inputs@{ self, flake-parts, ... }:
    flake-parts.lib.mkFlake { inherit inputs; } {
      debug = true;
      systems = [ "x86_64-linux" ];
      flake = {
        nixosConfigurations = {
          hostname = inputs.nixpkgs.lib.nixosSystem {
            system = "x86_64-linux";
            modules = [
              inputs.home-manager.nixosModules.home-manager

              # Add maomaowm nixos module
              inputs.maomaowm.nixosModules.maomaowm
              {
                programs.maomaowm.enable = true;
              }
              {
                home-manager = {
                  useGlobalPkgs = true;
                  useUserPackages = true;
                  backupFileExtension = "backup";
                  users."username".imports =
                    [
                      (
                        { ... }:
                        {
                          wayland.windowManager.maomaowm = {
                            enable = true;
                            settings = ''
                              # see config.conf
                            '';
                            autostart_sh = ''
                              # see autostart.sh
                              # Note: here no need to add shebang
                            '';
                          };
                        }
                      )
                    ]
                    ++ [
                      # Add maomaowm hm module
                      inputs.maomaowm.hmModules.maomaowm
                    ];
                };
              }
            ];
          };
        };
      };
    };
}

Packaging maomaowm

To package maomaowm for other distributions, you can check the reference setup for:

• nix
• arch.

Currently building maomaowm requires a patched version of wlroots-0.19. If possible, the patch can be extracted from the latest commit and applied on prepare step. If it is not possible, you will need to create a separate wlroots package and make it a build dependency. You might also need to package scenefx for your distribution, check availability here.

If you encounter build errors when packaging maomaowm, feel free to create an issue and ask a question, but Read The Friendly Manual on packaging software in your distribution first.

Thanks to These Reference Repositories

• https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wlroots/wlroots - Implementation of Wayland protocol

• https://github.com/dqrk0jeste/owl - Basal window animation

• https://codeberg.org/dwl/dwl - Basal dwl feature

• https://github.com/swaywm/sway - Sample of Wayland protocol

• https://github.com/wlrfx/scenefx - Make it simple to add window effect.