Description
This is an implementation of PaperWM-like scrollable tiling window management for Sway/i3wm. If you like Sway/i3wm’s commitments to stability, avoiding scope creep etc. but dislike the window management model, papersway might be of interest.
(click for animation)
On each workspace, windows are arranged in a row. By default, two of the windows in the row are visible at a time, and you can move left and right in the row to display other windows. Opening a new window pushes one of the visible windows off the screen to make room, and closing a window pulls in a window to fill the space. You can reorder the windows.
There is a display of the row of workspaces in the bar which allows you to see at a glance whether this workspace has any additional windows pushed off to the side, e.g. ‡ ‡ ‡ ‡ . Here, the focused workspace has four windows, and the middle two are the ones currently visible.
There are commands to change the number of visible windows; toggle a window into a wide window, which means that it always occupies all visible columns while it’s visible; and jump to a fresh workspace, which means a new, empty workspace occurring immediately after the currently focused workspace. E.g. if you have two workspaces, 1 2 and you request a fresh workspace, the second workspace will be renamed out of the way, leaving you with 1 2 3 and no windows visible.
A disadvantage of papersway as compared to PaperWM is the lack of animations. This can be disorientating at first, but usage quickly comes to feel natural.
Installation
You can install papersway and its dependencies from CPAN.
E.g. with cpanminus (available in distro repositories),
% cpanm App::papersway
and then add $HOME/perl5/bin to your PATH environment variable.
On Debian 13 or later & Ubuntu 24.10 or later, apt-get install papersway.
Usage
Usage instructions, including sample key bindings, are maintained in papersway(1).
Bug reports, patches etc.
Please see CONTRIBUTING, included in the source tree, for information regarding the reporting of bugs and submission of patches/pull requests.
See also
License
Copyright © 2019–2025 Sean Whitton
papersway is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
papersway is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with papersway. If not, see <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.