Umbriel

Umbriel is a Wayland compositor designed for daily use, with scrolling, dwindle, and master layouts, per-output workspaces, window rules, blur, shadows, and fluid animations.

It runs independently and can be paired with Noctalia, which provides a first-class desktop shell experience for Umbriel. Umbriel is built in C++23 on wlroots and umbrielfx, its own hard fork of SceneFX. Xwayland support comes from xwayland-satellite, which must be installed and on PATH. Portal screen capture and sharing is provided by xdg-desktop-portal-umbriel, an xdg-desktop-portal backend for Umbriel.

Features:

• Scrolling, dwindle, and master layouts with per-workspace selection, width presets, animated navigation, and mouse-driven resizing and tiled reordering
• Independent workspaces per output, with hotplug support and configurable modes, positions, scales, and transforms
• Floating, pinned, and fullscreen windows with configurable placement, focus, sizing, opacity, and visual effects
• Global named scratchpads for temporarily hiding window groups and summoning them on any output
• An animated overview, directional focus, configurable keybinds, submaps, and activation policy
• Blur, shadows, rounded corners, double borders, opacity, and animated position, size, and fade transitions
• Keyboard, pointer, touch, touchpad gestures, XKB configuration, and text-input-v3/input-method-v2 input method support
• Restricted Wayland connections for sandbox engines through security-context-v1, with per-application protocol grants
• Layer shell, session locking, clipboard management, screen capture, output control, and gamma control
• X11 application support through xwayland-satellite, when xwayland-satellite is installed and on PATH
• Live-reloaded TOML configuration with diagnostics and includes, plus local IPC and runtime inspection commands
• Runs as a nested Wayland compositor inside an existing Wayland or X11 desktop for development, or directly on DRM for daily use