FreeBSD Manual Pages
sway(1) General Commands Manual sway(1) NAME sway - An i3-compatible Wayland compositor SYNOPSIS sway [options...] [command] OPTIONS -h, --help Show help message and quit. -c, --config <config> Specifies a config file. -C, --validate Check the validity of the config file, then exit. -d, --debug Enables full logging, including debug information. -v, --version Show the version number and quit. -V, --verbose Enables more verbose logging. --get-socketpath Gets the IPC socket path and prints it, then exits. DESCRIPTION sway was created to fill the need of an i3-like window manager for Wayland. The upstream i3 developers have no intention of porting i3 to Wayland, and projects proposed by others ended up as vaporware. Many thanks to the i3 folks for providing such a great piece of software, so good that your users would rather write an entirely new window manager from scratch that behaved exactly like i3 rather than switch to something else. You can run sway directly from a tty, or via a Wayland-compatible login manager. CONFIGURATION sway searches for a config file in the following locations, in this order: 1. ~/.sway/config 2. $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/sway/config (suggested location) 3. ~/.i3/config 4. $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/i3/config 5. /etc/sway/config 6. /etc/i3/config If unset, $XDG_CONFIG_HOME defaults to ~/.config. An error is raised when no config file is found. The recommended default configuration is usually installed to /etc/sway/config; you are encouraged to copy this to ~/.config/sway/config and edit it from there. For information on the config file format, see sway(5). IPC COMMANDS Though swaymsg(1) is generally preferred, you may run sway command to send command to the running instance of sway. You can also issue commands with i3-msg(1) or even with i3(1). ENVIRONMENT The following environment variables have an effect on sway: SWAYSOCK Specifies the path to the sway IPC socket. XKB_DEFAULT_RULES, XKB_DEFAULT_MODEL, XKB_DEFAULT_LAYOUT, XKB_DEFAULT_VARI- ANT, XKB_DEFAULT_OPTIONS Configures the xkb keyboard settings. See xkeyboard-config(7). The pre- ferred way to configure the keyboard is via the configuration file, see sway-input(5). The following environment variables are set by sway: DISPLAY If compiled with Xwayland support and Xwayland is not disabled by the config, this will be set to the name of the X display used for Xway- land. I3SOCK For compatibility with i3, specifies the path to the sway IPC socket. SWAYSOCK Specifies the path to the sway IPC socket. WAYLAND_DISPLAY Specifies the name of the Wayland display that sway is running on. XCURSOR_SIZE Specifies the configured cursor size. XCURSOR_THEME Specifies the configured cursor theme. AUTHORS Maintained by Simon Ser <contact@emersion.fr>, who is assisted by other open source contributors. For more information about sway development, see <https://github.com/swaywm/sway>. SEE ALSO sway(5) swaymsg(1) sway-input(5) sway-output(5) sway-bar(5) sway-ipc(7) 2026-08-06 sway(1)
NAME | SYNOPSIS | OPTIONS | DESCRIPTION | CONFIGURATION | IPC COMMANDS | ENVIRONMENT | AUTHORS | SEE ALSO
Want to link to this manual page? Use this URL:
<https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=sway&sektion=1&manpath=FreeBSD+Ports+15.1.quarterly>