A new version of Miracle-wm, a Mir-based tiling window manager, is out.

Miracle-wm 0.4 continues to make inroads in fleshing out its support for i3 IPC, vital work needed to make sure popular tools like waybar, nwg-shell, etc work well as well here as they do in Sway, i3, hyprland, et al.

Workspace improvements aplenty make it in, also. Workspaces can be assigned names and those names relayed to shell components, while new commands make it easier for users to change workspaces and/or move containers to workspaces.

And there’s been a big focus on addressing ‘issues around stability and performance’ to the extent that it’s said to be ‘pretty usable as a daily driver’.

Other changes in Miracle-wm 0.4:

  • get tree, get outputs and get workspaces requests implemented
  • exit, focus, layout, scratchpad, reload commands implemented
  • Tabbed container and stacked container support
  • Upgrade to Mir 2.19

A full blow-by-blow is available on the project GitHub releases page, which also has links to download source code for those who want to compile it by hand (not strictly necessary since there’s an official snap, PPA, Copr, etc).

Matthew Kosarek, an engineer at Canonical (but working on Miracle-wm in his free time) is the creator of Miracle-wm and hopes to “create a flashy, cozy tiling window manager that absolutely anyone can use”.

This latest release comes a few steps closer to achieving that goal, with Kosarek himself noting:

Miracle is a lot more polished than it was before. I am able to daily drive it with great success at the moment, and I use it for all of my development. There are still some rough edges, but the progress that we’ve made in these past couple months (especially with the the push from the Fedora spin) has improved the project a ton.

Matthew Kosarek

Next year should see more frequent releases. A faster cadence could help deliver some momentum to this effort. Though led by a Canonical employee, there’s no sign of an Ubuntu Miracle remix forming, yet there a Fedora one.

Have you tried Miracle-wm yet? If you haven’t, it’s easy to do on Ubuntu as there’s an official Miracle-wm snap package or Miracle-wm PPA. Once installed you log out, pick miracle-wm from the login screen cog, and log in…

From there? Well, you’ll need to follow the introduction docs on the project wiki, and try out some tiling window manager tools to provide things like networking icons, an app launcher, task bar/panel, etc.

I find the setup curve a rad steep, plus the documentation assumes a lot – not a criticism per se (it’s all still in development) but a few example configs or at least something more than a black screen on first run would ease-in folks looking to tussle with tiling WMs.

Hyprland does all of that very well.