somewm

August 7, 2026 · View on GitHub

A Lua framework for building your Wayland desktop. Layouts, widgets, keybindings, window rules, notifications, status bars, etc.

SomeWM has a complete widget system, a signal-driven object model, and a compositor runtime, all wired together so every piece can talk to every other piece. Write a widget that reacts to window focus changes. Build a layout that adapts to screen geometry. Script your entire workflow from rc.lua or from the command line.

Built on wlroots 0.19 or 0.20. Compatible with AwesomeWM's Lua API - existing configs, widgets, and themes carry over.

This branch (main) is 2.0-dev. If you want 100% AwesomeWM parity, use the release/1.4 branch or install somewm from the AUR.

Default configuration Styled configuration

Default config (left) and a styled config (right)

Install

Arch Linux (AUR):

yay -S somewm      # Stable 1.4
yay -S somewm-git  # Development (this branch)

From source:

git clone https://github.com/trip-zip/somewm
cd somewm
make
sudo make install

For Debian, Fedora, NixOS, and detailed instructions, see the Installation Guide.

wlroots version. The build uses wlroots 0.20 if you already have it installed. If not, it picks 0.20 when your wayland-server, libdrm, xkbcommon, wayland-protocols and pixman are new enough to build it, and 0.19 otherwise. Older stable distributions (Debian 13, Ubuntu 24.04) fall into the 0.19 case. meson setup prints which version it chose, and when it falls back to 0.19 it names the dependencies that came up short.

Override the choice with meson setup build -Dwlroots_version=0.19 (or 0.20). If wlroots is not installed, the matching version is built from subprojects/.

The 0.19 path exists for these older distributions and will be dropped once they ship wlroots 0.20 or the dependency versions it needs.