Thought I would try out a new dynamic window manager called MangoWM.

It's a Wayland compositor — tiling, tag-based, minimal. It sits in the same space as dwl but with a cleaner config format and a few quality-of-life additions that made it worth trying. No GNOME, no KDE, no compositor framework weighing things down. Just a window manager that does what I tell it.

mango desktop screenshot

The Stack

Everything around the compositor is hand-picked:

  • swaybg for the wallpaper — a beach photo that survived several config cleanups and earned its place
  • waybar for the panel — ext/workspaces on the left, stats drawer in the centre, system tray on the right
  • mako for notifications — styled dark with a soft blue border, anchored top-right
  • wmenu as the launcher — lightweight, keyboard-driven, fits the minimal philosophy
  • foot as the terminal

Keybindings

Everything runs through Super. No Alt conflicts, no guesswork:

  • Super+Return — foot terminal
  • Super+Space — wmenu launcher
  • Super+w — Firefox
  • Super+t — Telegram
  • Super+b — GNOME Boxes
  • Super+q — kill window
  • Super+f — fullscreen
  • Super+s — float
  • Super+1–9 — switch tags
  • Super+Shift+1–9 — move window to tag
  • Super+Shift+arrows — focus direction
  • Print — full screenshot
  • Super+Print — region screenshot

Screenshots land in ~/Screenshots/ with a timestamp filename and a notify-send confirmation.

Visual Tuning

The defaults needed work. Animations were the first thing to go — all durations set to zero, layer animations disabled. The compositor feels snappier for it.

Gaps are 3px all round. Focused windows get a soft green border (0x88bb88ff) — just visible enough to know what you're looking at without shouting.

Window rules assign apps to fixed tags automatically: Firefox to tag 3, Telegram to tag 2, GNOME Boxes to tag 4. The workspace is consistent every time.

What I Like About It

Tag-based layout suits the way I work. I don't want infinite dynamic workspaces — I want a fixed map I can navigate without thinking. Mango handles that well.

The config format is readable. Changes are fast to test. Compared to the yak-shaving involved in some other compositors, it's been surprisingly low-friction once the initial setup was done.

It's not perfect. The ecosystem is smaller than Hyprland or sway. Documentation is thin in places. But for a personal desktop that I understand top to bottom, it works exactly as intended.