Tiling Window Management for Windows.
komorebi is a tiling window manager that works as an extension to Microsoft's Desktop Window Manager in Windows 10 and above.
komorebi allows you to control application windows, virtual workspaces and display monitors with a CLI which can be
used with third-party software such as whkd
and AutoHotKey to set user-defined keyboard shortcuts.
komorebi aims to make as few modifications as possible to the operating system and desktop environment by default. Users are free to make such modifications in their own configuration files for komorebi, but these will remain opt-in and off-by-default for the foreseeable future.
Please refer to the documentation for instructions on how to install and configure komorebi, common workflows, a complete configuration schema reference and a complete CLI reference.
There is a Discord server available for komorebi-related discussion, help, troubleshooting etc. If you have any specific feature requests or bugs to report, please create an issue in this repository.
There is a YouTube channel where I post komorebi development videos. If you would like to be notified of upcoming videos please subscribe and turn on notifications.
There is an Awesome List which showcases the many awesome projects that exist in the komorebi ecosystem.
komorebi is a free and source-available project, and one that encourages you to make charitable donations if you find the software to be useful and have the financial means.
I encourage you to make a charitable donation to the Palestine Children's Relief Fund before you consider sponsoring me on GitHub.
GitHub Sponsors is enabled for this project. Unfortunately I don't have anything specific to offer besides my gratitude and shout outs at the end of komorebi live development videos and tutorials.
If you would like to tip or sponsor the project but are unable to use GitHub Sponsors, you may also sponsor through Ko-fi.
A detailed installation and quickstart
guide is available which shows how to get started
using scoop
, winget
or building from source.
Community member Olge has created an excellent video which compares the default window management features of Windows 11, Fancy Zones and komorebi.
If you are not familiar with tiling window managers or if you are looking at komorebi and wondering "how is this different from Fancy Zones? ?", this short video will answer the majority of your questions.
@amnweb showing komorebi v0.1.28
running on Windows 11 with window borders,
unfocused window transparency and animations enabled, using a custom status bar integrated using
komorebi's Window Manager Event Subscriptions.
@haxibami showing komorebi running on Windows 11 with a terminal emulator, a web browser and a code editor. The original video can be viewed here.
@aik2mlj showing komorebi running on Windows 11 with multiple workspaces, terminal emulators, a web browser, and the yasb status bar with the komorebi workspace widget enabled. The original video can be viewed here.
If you would like to contribute to komorebi
please take the time to carefully read the guidelines below.
use
statementscargo +stable clippy
and ensure that all lints and suggestions have been addressed before committingcargo +nightly fmt --all
to ensure consistent formatting before committinggit cz
with
the Commitizen CLI to prepare
commit messagesIt is very difficult to review pull requests which touch multiple unrelated features and parts of the codebase.
Please do not submit pull requests like this; you will be asked to separate them into smaller PRs that deal only with one feature or bug fix at a time.
If you are working on multiple features and bug fixes, I suggest that you cut a branch called local-trunk
from master
which you keep up to date, and rebase the various independent branches you are working on onto that branch
if you want to test them together or create a build with everything integrated.
komorebi
is a mature codebase with an internal consistency and structure that has developed organically over close to
half a decade.
There are countless hours of live coding videos demonstrating work on this project and
showing new contributors how to do everything from basic tasks like implementing new komorebic
commands to
distinguishing monitors by manufacturer hardware identifiers and video card ports.
Refactors to the structure of the codebase are not taken lightly and require prior discussion and approval.
Please do not start refactoring the codebase with the expectation of having your changes integrated until you receive an explicit approval or a request to do so.
Similarly, when implementing features and bug fixes, please stick to the structure of the codebase as much as possible and do not take this as an opportunity to do some "refactoring along the way".
It is extremely difficult to review PRs for features and bug fixes if they are lost in sweeping changes to the structure of the codebase.
This includes but is not limited to:
komorebic
commandskomorebi.json
schemakomorebi-application-specific-configuration
schemaNo user should ever find that their configuration file has stopped working after upgrading to a new version
of komorebi
.
More often than not there are ways to reformulate changes that may initially seem like they require breaking user-facing interfaces into additive changes.
For some inspiration please take a look
at this commit which added the
ability for users to specify colours in komorebi.json
in Hex format alongside RGB.
There is also a process in place for graceful, non-breaking, deprecation of configuration options that are no longer required.
komorebi
is licensed under the Komorebi 1.0.0 license, which
is a fork of the PolyForm Strict 1.0.0
license. On a high level
this means that you are free to do whatever you want with komorebi
for
personal use other than redistribution, or distribution of new works (ie.
hard-forks) based on the software.
Anyone is free to make their own fork of komorebi
with changes intended
either for personal use or for integration back upstream via pull requests.
The Komorebi 1.0.0 License does not permit any kind of commercial use.
A dedicated license and EULA will be introduced in 2025 for both commercial and noncommercial organizations.
Please see CONTRIBUTING.md for more information about how
code contributions to komorebi
are licensed.
If you use IntelliJ, you should enable the following settings to ensure that code generated by macros is recognised by the IDE for completions and navigation:
Expand declarative macros
to Use new engine
under "Settings > Langauges & Frameworks > Rust"org.rust.cargo.evaluate.build.scripts
org.rust.macros.proc
Logs from komorebi
will be appended to %LOCALAPPDATA%/komorebi/komorebi.log
; this file is never rotated or overwritten, so it will keep
growing until it is deleted by the user.
Whenever running the komorebic stop
command or sending a Ctrl-C signal to komorebi
directly, the komorebi
process
ensures that all hidden windows are restored before termination.
If however, you ever end up with windows that are hidden and cannot be restored, a list of window handles known
to komorebi
are stored and continuously updated in %LOCALAPPDATA%/komorebi//komorebi.hwnd.json
.
Running komorebic restore-windows
will read the list of window handles and forcibly restore them, regardless of
whether the main komorebi
process is running.
If komorebi
ever stops responding, it is most likely either due to either a panic or a deadlock. In the case of a
panic, this will be reported in the log. In the case of a deadlock, there will not be any errors in the log, but the
process and the log will appear frozen.
If you believe you have encountered a deadlock, you can compile komorebi
with --features deadlock_detection
and try
reproducing the deadlock again. This will check for deadlocks every 5 seconds in the background, and if a deadlock is
found, information about it will appear in the log which can be shared when opening an issue.
The current state of the window manager can be queried using the komorebic state
command, which returns a JSON
representation of the State
struct.
This may also be polled to build further integrations and widgets on top of.
It is possible to subscribe to notifications of every WindowManagerEvent
and SocketMessage
handled
by komorebi
using Named Pipes.
First, your application must create a named pipe. Once the named pipe has been created, run the following command:
komorebic.exe subscribe-pipe <your pipe name>
Note that you do not have to include the full path of the named pipe, just the name.
If the named pipe exists, komorebi
will start pushing JSON data of successfully handled events and messages:
{"event":{"type":"AddSubscriber","content":"yasb"},"state":{}}
{"event":{"type":"FocusWindow","content":"Left"},"state":{}}
{"event":{"type":"FocusChange","content":["SystemForeground",{"hwnd":131444,"title":"komorebi – README.md","exe":"idea64.exe","class":"SunAwtFrame","rect":{"left":13,"top":60,"right":1520,"bottom":1655}}]},"state":{}}
{"event":{"type":"MonitorPoll","content":["ObjectCreate",{"hwnd":5572450,"title":"OLEChannelWnd","exe":"explorer.exe","class":"OleMainThreadWndClass","rect":{"left":0,"top":0,"right":0,"bottom":0}}]},"state":{}}
{"event":{"type":"FocusWindow","content":"Right"},"state":{}}
{"event":{"type":"FocusChange","content":["SystemForeground",{"hwnd":132968,"title":"Windows PowerShell","exe":"WindowsTerminal.exe","class":"CASCADIA_HOSTING_WINDOW_CLASS","rect":{"left":1539,"top":60,"right":1520,"bottom":821}}]},"state":{}}
{"event":{"type":"FocusWindow","content":"Down"},"state":{}}
{"event":{"type":"FocusChange","content":["SystemForeground",{"hwnd":329264,"title":"den — Mozilla Firefox","exe":"firefox.exe","class":"MozillaWindowClass","rect":{"left":1539,"top":894,"right":1520,"bottom":821}}]},"state":{}}
{"event":{"type":"FocusWindow","content":"Up"},"state":{}}
{"event":{"type":"FocusChange","content":["SystemForeground",{"hwnd":132968,"title":"Windows PowerShell","exe":"WindowsTerminal.exe","class":"CASCADIA_HOSTING_WINDOW_CLASS","rect":{"left":1539,"top":60,"right":1520,"bottom":821}}]},"state":{}}
You may then filter on the type
key to listen to the events that you are interested in. For a full list of possible
notification types, refer to the enum variants of WindowManagerEvent
in komorebi
and SocketMessage
in komorebi::core
.
Below is an example of how you can subscribe to and filter on events using a named pipe in nodejs
.
const { exec } = require("child_process");
const net = require("net");
const pipeName = "\\.\pipe\komorebi-js";
const server = net.createServer((stream) => {
console.log("Client connected");
// Every time there is a workspace-related event, let's log the names of all
// workspaces on the currently focused monitor, and then log the name of the
// currently focused workspace on that monitor
stream.on("data", (data) => {
let json = JSON.parse(data.toString());
let event = json.event;
if (event.type.includes("Workspace")) {
let monitors = json.state.monitors;
let current_monitor = monitors.elements[monitors.focused];
let workspaces = monitors.elements[monitors.focused].workspaces;
let current_workspace = workspaces.elements[workspaces.focused];
console.log(
workspaces.elements
.map((workspace) => workspace.name)
.filter((name) => name !== null)
);
console.log(current_workspace.name);
}
});
stream.on("end", () => {
console.log("Client disconnected");
});
});
server.listen(pipeName, () => {
console.log("Named pipe server listening");
});
const command = "komorebic subscribe-pipe komorebi-js";
exec(command, (error, stdout, stderr) => {
if (error) {
console.error(`Error executing command: ${error}`);
return;
}
});
It is possible to subscribe to notifications of every WindowManagerEvent
and SocketMessage
handled
by komorebi
using Unix Domain Sockets.
UDS are also the only mode of communication between komorebi
and komorebic
.
First, your application must create a socket in $ENV:LocalAppDatakomorebi
. Once the socket has been created, run the
following command:
komorebic.exe subscribe-socket <your socket name>
If the socket exists, komorebi will start pushing JSON data of successfully handled events and messages as in the example above in the Named Pipes section.
As of v0.1.22
it is possible to use the komorebi-client
crate to subscribe to notifications of
every WindowManagerEvent
and SocketMessage
handled by komorebi
in a Rust codebase.
Below is a simple example of how to use komorebi-client
in a basic Rust application.
// komorebi-client = { git = "https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi", tag = "v0.1.30"}
use anyhow::Result;
use komorebi_client::Notification;
use komorebi_client::NotificationEvent;
use komorebi_client::UnixListener;
use komorebi_client::WindowManagerEvent;
use std::io::BufRead;
use std::io::BufReader;
use std::io::Read;
pub fn main() -> anyhow::Result<()> {
let socket = komorebi_client::subscribe(NAME)?;
for incoming in socket.incoming() {
match incoming {
Ok(data) => {
let reader = BufReader::new(data.try_clone()?);
for line in reader.lines().flatten() {
let notification: Notification = match serde_json::from_str(&line) {
Ok(notification) => notification,
Err(error) => {
log::debug!("discarding malformed komorebi notification: {error}");
continue;
}
};
// match and filter on desired notifications
}
}
Err(error) => {
log::debug!("{error}");
}
}
}
}
A read-world example can be found in komokana.
A JSON Schema of the event notifications emitted to subscribers can be generated with
the komorebic notification-schema
command. The output of this command can be redirected to the clipboard or a file,
which can be used with services such as Quicktype to generate type definitions in different
programming languages.
A TCP listener can optionally be exposed on a port of your choosing with the --tcp-port=N
flag. If this flag is not
provided to komorebi
or komorebic start
, no TCP listener will be created.
Once created, your client may send
any SocketMessage to komorebi
in the
same way that komorebic
would.
This can be used if you would like to create your own alternative to komorebic
which incorporates scripting and
various middleware layers, and similarly it can be used if you would like to integrate komorebi
with
a custom input handler.
If a client sends an unrecognized message, it will be disconnected and have to reconnect before trying to communicate again.
A JSON Schema of socket messages used to send instructions to komorebi
can be generated
with the komorebic socket-schema
command. The output of this command can be redirected to the clipboard or a file,
which can be used with services such as Quicktype to generate type definitions in different
programming languages.
First and foremost, thank you to my wife, both for naming this project and for her patience throughout its never-ending development
Thank you to @sitiom for being an exemplary open source community leader
Thank you to the developers of nog who came before me and whose work taught me more than I can ever hope to repay
Thank you to the developers of GlazeWM for pushing the boundaries of tiling window management on Windows with me and having an excellent spirit of collaboration
Thank you to @Ciantic for helping me bring the hidden Virtual Desktops cloaking function to komorebi