Carrot

A pure Rust tiling Wayland compositor with a Vulkan rendering pipeline. Carrot aims to be a feature-complete, all-in-one compositor with native support for blur, animations, multi-GPU, tearing, and more - no scripting or external tools needed.

Warning

Carrot is in extremely early development and is not yet usable. Any contributions, suggestions, or feedback are welcome.

Note

This README is a draft, and is not in any way final. Anything described in this document is subject to change.

Complete List of Intended Features

Tiling

• Dwindle layout with directional focus, window swapping, and split ratio control
• Window groups (tabbed) with a styled groupbar
• Floating layer with mouse drag move/resize, centering, and PiP mode
• Fullscreen (real, bordered, and borderless), pin (visible on all workspaces)
• Force float/tile per window via window rules - no need for apps to behave

Workspaces

• Numbered workspaces with relative navigation
• Workspace groups - sets of 10, navigable within and between groups
• Special workspaces (named scratchpads) with toggle-and-launch behavior

Eye Candy

• Multi-pass Kawase blur with per-window and per-layer control
• Drop shadows with configurable falloff
• Rounded corners, per-window opacity, active/inactive borders
• Animations - custom bezier curves, spring physics, per-property config
  • Styles: slide, slidefadevert, popin, fade

Window & Layer Rules

• Match by class, title, fullscreen state, xwayland, float (regex)
• Tons of effects: opacity, float, size, center, workspace assignment, immediate (tearing), idle inhibit, rounding, blur, shadow, dim, pin, keep aspect ratio
• Focus steal control - let specific apps actually grab focus when they ask for it, instead of just marking urgent
• Input redirection - route specific keys to unfocused/offscreen windows, with redirect (background only) or passthrough (both) modes
• Layer rules: animation overrides, blur, ignore alpha threshold

Input

• Per-device mouse configuration (accel profile, sensitivity, natural scroll)
• Configurable keyboard repeat, layout, numlock
• Keybind types: press, lock-safe, repeat, release, mouse
• Submaps - switchable keybind contexts

Performance & Gaming

• Tearing via wp_tearing_control_v1 with per-window immediate rule
• VRR (adaptive sync) - off, automatic, or always, per-output
• Direct scanout bypass for fullscreen windows
• Multi-GPU - cross-GPU DMA-BUF import, blit and direct import paths, explicit sync, configurable renderer skip on secondary GPUs
• Per-output GPU assignment - render specific displays on a selectable GPUs (e.g. iGPU for laptop screen, eGPU for gaming monitor)

IPC

• Custom JSON socket protocol ($XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/carrot/<instance>/)
• Queries: active window, workspaces, workspace groups, special workspaces, monitors, clients
• Event stream: window open/close, focus, workspace changes, monitor hotplug, fullscreen, urgent
• Dispatcher commands over IPC (exec, workspace, focus, move, resize, kill, etc.)
• Launch-to-workspace - spawn windows on any workspace without the need of switching to it first

Integration

• XWayland support via xwayland-satellite
• ext-idle-notify-v1 for idle/lock management
• wlr-layer-shell for panels, overlays, and lock screens
• wlr-foreign-toplevel-management for taskbars and window switchers
• Screencopy for screenshots
• Clipboard via zwlr_data_control_v1
• DPMS wake on input

Configuration

Carrot uses KDL for configuration, with full NixOS and Home Manager module integration.

general {
    layout "dwindle"
    allow-tearing true
    border-size 3
}

decoration {
    rounding 10
    blur {
        enabled true
        size 8
        passes 2
    }
    shadow {
        enabled true
        range 20
    }
}

animations {
    bezier "standard" 0.2 0.0 0.0 1.0

    animation "windowsIn" {
        enabled true
        speed 5
        curve "standard"
    }
}

window-rule {
    match class="steam_app_.*"
    immediate true
    idle-inhibit "always"
}

bind "Super" "Return" "exec" "foot"

NixOS / Home Manager

# flake.nix inputs
inputs.carrot.url = "github:flammablebunny/carrot";

# NixOS module
programs.carrot.enable = true;

# Home Manager module
wayland.windowManager.carrot = {
  enable = true;
  settings = {
    general = {
      layout = "dwindle";
      allow_tearing = true;
    };
    decoration = {
      rounding = 10;
      blur = { enabled = true; size = 8; passes = 2; };
    };
  };
};

Building

With Nix

nix build github:flammablebunny/carrot

With Cargo

cargo build --release

System dependencies: vulkan-loader, libdrm, libinput, libseat, libxkbcommon, wayland-protocols

Acknowledgments

Carrot is built from scratch, with no framework or compositor library dependency. References and inspiration:

• Jay - proved a from-scratch Vulkan Wayland compositor in Rust is viable for a solo dev
• Niri - reference for animation design and window rules
• ash - Vulkan bindings for Rust

License

GPL-3.0 - see LICENSE for details.

Communtity, Dev Discussions, and Support

Discord Server