A new version of Miracle-wm, a tiling window manager built around the Wayland compositor Mir, has been released with a new WebAssembly plugin system and Rust API.
Developer Matthew Kosarek, an engineer at Canonical who created miracle-wm as a personal side project, says the new plugin system in v0.9 release will allow for greater window management, animation and configuration, thus making miracle-wm “truly hackable”.
He also shared a video overview of the changes in the latest update:
A new Rust API for writing plugins is supported in Miracle 0.9, with documentation available for fans of the memory-safe language to swot over; it also now supports cursor themes, making good on its promise of being an equally-flashy rival for the likes of Sway, Niri et al.
Other changes in Miracle-wm 0.9:
- Reload configuration using super + shift + r
- Speed improvements
- Display configurations auto-reload when changed
- New project icon
- Windows tiling when they shouldn’t fix
- Improved use of locking
Plus a slew of smaller, less obvious changes below the surface and a breaking change: existing configs using Linux keycodes for custom actions (or default keybinding overrides) will need to switch to using XKbKeysyms values instead.
Getting this update
You can install miracle-wm on Ubuntu using official snap package (sudo snap install miracle-wm --classic) or the DEB builds available from the miracle-wm PPA for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (the PPA does lag behind in updates, so keep that in mind).
For more details, see the project GitHub.
If you decide to try it out, keep in mind Miracle is window manager and not a desktop environment. You won’t see much if you logout out of your current desktop session, pick the “miracle-wm” session from the cog menu on the login screen, and log back in.
First, you’llneed to create a configuration file (in a text editor) to specify the tools, apps and keyboard shortcuts you want to use. The docs on the project wiki guide you through the what’s-what of doing that.
Small tip: to log out of miracle-wm you can press super + shift + e .