🏞 mackenzie

A simple scrolling window manager/compositor for River. It is written to fit my specific needs, and a way to teach myself how to code in rust.

• Named after the longest river in Canada, the Mackenzie river.
• Minimal scrolling layout, heavily inspired by niri.
• Written in rust
• Built upon tinyrwm
• Features:
  • No frills (menu, titlebar, icons, animations*, pixmap themes, etc...)
  • Configration file uses toml format
  • Supports multi-output setups
  • Basic IPC call for use with waybar or quickshell
  • Easy to read code structure so others can easily understand, reference and learn from

* may be added later

v0.1.0

• Build dependencies
  • river >= 0.4.x
  • toml
  • libxkbcommon

cargo build --release
sudo cp target/release/mackenzie /usr/local/bin/
cp examples/mackenzie.toml ~/.config/river/

Mackenzie needs to be invoked using River:

river -c mackenzie

or add a line to exec mackenzie in the river init file ~/.config/river/init as follows:

#!/bin/bash

swaybg -c "#252525" &
waybar &
# ... other autostart items

exec /usr/local/bin/mackenzie

For use as an ipc client:

mackenzie --get     [status|version|tags]
          --watch   tags
          --action  focus_tag 1
                    focus left
                    quit 
                    ... etc

Default configuration file is read from $HOME/.config/river/mackenzie.toml.

It is divided into 5 sections:

• layout - configuration of the generic WM and layout features

  [layout]
  n_tags = 3
  gap = 10
  scroll_edge_gap = 15
  default_column_width = 0.5

• window - configuration of the individual window

  [window]
  move_resize_step = 15
  border_width = 2
  border_color_focused = "#1793D0"
  border_color_unfocused = "#333333FF"    # Specify the alpha with the last two digits

• inputs - configuration of the inputs

  [inputs]
  xkb_layout = "us"
  xkb_options = "compose:ralt"
  touchpad_tap_click = true
  touchpad_natural_scroll = true

• rules - window rules to apply

  [rules]
  windowrules = [
      # template:
      # { app_id="id", title="some title", width=0.5, maximized = true, floating=true, tag=1, output="output_name" }
      {app_id="Firefox", floating = true},
  ]

• keybinds - defines key bindings

  [keybinds]
  # Mod1=Alt, Mod4=Super
  Mod1-space = { action="spawn", args=["foot"] }
  Mod4-Shift-h = { action="focus", args=["left"] }
  XF86AudioMute = { action="spawn", args=["pactl", "set-sink-mute", "@DEFAULT_SINK@", "toggle"] }

  • If no configuration is provided, it defaults to two hard-coded fallback keybinds:
    • Mod1+space spawns foot terminal emulator
    • Mod1+q to quit the compositor
• mousebinds - defines mouse bindings

  [mousebinds]
  Mod1-BTN_LEFT = { action="move_floating" }
  Mod1-BTN_RIGHT = { action="resize_floating" }

Please use the Github Issues Tracker to report bugs and issues.

• 0.2 (work in progress)
  • Goal: Streamline the code and focus on efficiency
• 0.1.0 (2026-10-05) (download)
  • Goal: get the base code in working order