Alternatives to miracle-wm
A hackable tiling Wayland compositor for Linux built on Mir, with i3-style tiling and animations. The listings below can replace it for an important use case. Each note says what changes if you switch.
The original
miracle-wm
A hackable tiling Wayland compositor for Linux built on Mir, with i3-style tiling and animations.
Replacements
Listings that take over the same core job as miracle-wm.
Sway
Use an i3-style tiling workflow on Wayland.
Sway offers i3-style tiling on Wayland with support for much of the i3 configuration format, and has a larger community than miracle-wm.
Hyprland
Arrange Linux application windows with a configurable tiling Wayland compositor.
Hyprland is a dynamic tiling Wayland compositor with animations and extensive keyboard and layout configuration, and a larger community than miracle-wm.
niri
A scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor that places windows in columns on an endless horizontal strip.
niri uses scrollable column tiling where opening windows never resizes existing ones, and provides an IPC interface for scripting and status bars.
dwl
A dwm-like dynamic tiling Wayland compositor built on the wlroots library.
dwl is a minimal dwm-style tiling compositor built on wlroots, customised by editing C source and recompiling rather than through plugins.
river
A non-monolithic Wayland compositor that leaves window management to a separate program.
river delegates window management to a separate replaceable program over a documented protocol, and building it requires the Zig toolchain.
Wayfire
A wlroots-based Wayland compositor with plugin-driven window management and 3D desktop effects.
Wayfire is a wlroots-based compositor with plugin-driven window management and 3D effects, though its releases can be far apart.
Qtile
Configure a tiling window manager using Python.
Qtile is a tiling window manager configured in Python with programmable layouts and widgets, offering both X11 and Wayland back ends.
i3
Arrange X11 windows in a keyboard-controlled tiling workspace.
i3 is the keyboard-controlled tree-based tiling manager miracle-wm's style comes from, but it runs on X11 rather than Wayland.
Similar software
Related functionality, not a direct replacement.
Waybar
Add a customizable status bar to compatible Wayland desktops.
Ironbar
A customisable GTK4 status bar for Wayland compositors, written in Rust.
nwg-panel
Add desktop panels to Sway and Hyprland using GTK.
rofi
A keyboard-driven window switcher, application launcher and dmenu replacement for Linux desktops.
