tarazed.1
This is the main manual page of tarazed. See also tarazed(5).
TARAZED(1) General Commands Manual TARAZED(1)
NAME
tarazed —— window manager for river
SYNOPSIS
tarazed
DESCRIPTION
tarazed is a window manager for the river(1) display server. It aims to
provide a pleasant yet efficient work environment free of needless distrac‐
tions. Visually it takes inspirations from the Unix workstations of old,
without however copying their behaviour. Common window management mis-fea‐
tures, like automatic tiling or workspaces, are explicitly not implemented;
focusing instead on finding more powerful solutions to the use cases they
serve.
DEFAULT KEYBINDS
This section briefly lists the default keybinds that tarazed sets up auto‐
matically. Refer to the “BINDS” section in tarazed(5) for an indepth de‐
scription of key binds.
S-<any letter except x>
Try to focus a window with either an app-id or a title that
starts with that letter, preferring to stay on the same out‐
put as the currently focused window.
Refer to the documentation of !focus-by-char in the “BINDS”
section in tarazed(5) for an exact description of the used
algorithm.
S-x S-x Same as above, but for the letter ‘x.’
S-x b Move focused window to the bottom in z order.
S-x f Move focused window to the top in z order.
S-x S-q Close focused window.
S-x S-f Toggle fullscreen state of the focused window.
S-x m Toggle maximization state of the focused window.
S-x S-o Move the focused window to the next output.
S-x d Dismiss the currently focused window: Move it to the bottom
in z order and focus the highest window in z order. Concep‐
tionally similar to bury-buffer in emacs(1).
S-x S-d Dismiss the currently focused window and all other windows
that share its app-id.
S-x M-d Dismiss all windows that share the app-id of the currently
focused window except for the currently focused window.
S-x S-c End the river(1) session.
DEFAULT BEHAVIOUR
New windows are given free reign over their initial size. They are however
forced to use server side decoration. New windows are automatically focused
and moved to the top in z order.
The position of new windows is determined using the following heuristic.
1. If the window is a child window, position it centered on top of
its parent.
2. If an output and relative position on that output for the win‐
dows app-id exists in cache delete that cache entry. If that
output currently exists, use it and the cached relative posi‐
tion.
3. Use the output the currently focused window is on. If no rela‐
tive position was retrieved from cache, center the window on the
output.
4. If no window is currently focused, use the output the pointer is
on. Position the window as described above.
5. If no pointer exists, use the most center output and position
the window as described above.
The output of a window and its relative position on that output are cached
when the window is closed. Caching is done with app-id granularity.
When the focused window is closed, the focus automatically advances to the
highest window in z order while preferring to stay on the same output. See
“IDIOSYNCRACIES” to learn when a window is considered to be on an output.
IDIOSYNCRACIES
The output a window is on refers to the output which has the largest over‐
lap with the window, and vice versa. Unless explicitly stated otherwise,
an operation targetting all windows on an output refers to the operation
targetting all windows that have the largest overlap with this output.
ENVIRONMENT
$WAYLAND_DISPLAY is used to determine the location of the servers display
socket.
$WAYLAND_DEBUG may be set to enable wayland debug output. This is not
passed on to spawned processes.
$XDG_CONFIG_HOME is used to locate configuration files. See “FILES” for
more details.
$XDG_CACHE_HOME is used to locate cache files. See “FILES” for more de‐
tails.
$HOME is used as a fallback when $XDG_CACHE_HOME or $XDG_CONFIG_HOME are
not set.
FILES
/etc/tarazed/config
The global configuration file.
$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/tarazed/config or $HOME/.config/tarazed/config
The user configuration file
$XDG_CACHE_HOME/tarazed/ or $HOME/.cache/tarazed/
Cache data files are stored in this directory, on per app-id.
COMPATIBILITY
tarazed requires the following wayland interfaces to function.
Interface / Protocol Mininum Version Ideal Version
river-window-management-v1 1 4
river-layer-shell-v1 1 1
river-xkb-bindings-v1 1 2
wl-compositor 4 4
wl-subcompositor 1 1
wp-viewporter 1 1
wl-shm 1 2
wp-fractional-scale-v1 1 1
wp-cursor-shape-v1 1 1
ext-idle-notify-v1 1 2
SEE ALSO
river(1), tarazed(5)
AUTHORS
Leon Henrik Plickat <leonhenrik.plickat@mpinat.mpg.de>
ETHICS
Neither tarazed itself nor this manual page are infected by the LLM rot.
This project is entirely free of generative AI and similar machine learning
abominations.
??? 2026-03-09 TARAZED(1)