Wio: Plan 9's Rio Windowing System Re-Implemented As A Wayland Compositor

Wio is the newest Wayland compositor out there and re-implements Rio, the windowing system used by Bell Labs' Plan 9 operating system.

Wio is a side project of Drew DeVault, the lead developer of the Sway i3-inspired Wayland compositor as well as the WLROOTS Wayland library.

With WLROOTS allowing for a lot of code re-use between Wayland compositors and Drew also leveraging the kiosk-like Cage Wayland compositor, it was a feasible project having a Rio-inspired compositor.

Rio allows running another instance of itself inside the window manager and makes the window management process transparent to the application. In the case of Wio, each application is run in its own Cage Wayland compositor.

In being relevant for 2019, Wio supports multi-head displays, HiDPI support, and other features not originally supported by Rio.

Those curious about the Wio Wayland compositor can learn more on Drew's blog.