Thomas Adam (Thomas Adam), creator of the FVWM3 window manager, one of the key developers of FVWM and maintainer of the portable version of the terminal multiplexer tmux, published the project CoW, aimed at creating a stack window manager in the style of FVWM and MWM, which uses the Wayland protocol instead of X11. Among the differences, a simpler configuration mechanism is noted, in which, instead of a complicated configuration syntax, a set of commands is used, similar to the tmux commands used both in the configuration file and in the IPC remote control interface. The code is written in C and is distributed under the ISC license. Assemblies are generated for Arch Linux, Fedora and OpenBSD.
CoW implementedon top of a modular composite River server, which is responsible for implementing the Wayland protocol, rendering, and managing access for input and output.
CoW implements abstractions for windowing, IPC, commands, and capabilities for window stacking, decoding, and layout. This separation allowed us to focus on window management functions without being distracted by the intricacies of working with the Wayland protocol.
On top of the window manager, the cowbar panel, the cow-appmenu application menu, the cowpager virtual desktop navigator, the cowbuttons launcher and the cowiconman interface for viewing a list of windows are launched. Instead of the built-in panel, you can use the Waybar panel. Version CoW 0.4 is notable for adding the ability to use top-level window containers to create arbitrary window layouts on the screen (a top-level window can be divided into columns and rows, the size of which changes independently of each other).
