Show HN: Tileroot – save/restore tiling WM layouts (sway, Hyprland, i3)

Save and restore your tiling window manager's layout across a reboot or crash — sway, Hyprland, and (soon) i3, all with one tool.

Every sway/Hyprland/i3 user eventually hand-rolls a shell script that calls swaymsg / hyprctl + jq to save their window layout, and every one of those scripts breaks the next time the WM updates. The one existing attempt at a real tool, hypr-session-restore , is Hyprland-only and — by its own README — can't reconstruct the actual tiling layout tree, because Hyprland's IPC doesn't expose one. i3-resurrect solves this well for i3, but nothing unifies i3, sway, and Hyprland in one tool.

tileroot does. Sway (and i3, once it lands) implement the same IPC wire protocol, so exact layout reconstruction there is a solved problem, not a research project. Hyprland's IPC genuinely doesn't expose a split tree, so tileroot is honest about it: on Hyprland, dump records every tiled window's exact geometry in left-to-right order and restore replays that geometry directly, rather than pretending to reconstruct a tree that doesn't exist.

Recorded live against a real running Hyprland session — not staged.

AUR (Arch, recommended for this audience):

curl -sL https://github.com/Hinikaa/tileroot/releases/latest/download/install.sh | sh From source:

git clone https://github.com/Hinikaa/tileroot cd tileroot make tileroot Requires a C++17 compiler and the nlohmann-json header ( nlohmann-json on Arch, nlohmann-json3-dev on Debian/Ubuntu).

tileroot dump [--workspace NAME] [-o FILE] [--pretty] [--verbose] tileroot restore [FILE] [--dry-run] [--verbose] dump with no -o prints session JSON to stdout; -o FILE writes it atomically (a crash or Ctrl-C mid-write never corrupts an existing save). --pretty prints a human-readable box-drawing tree instead — good for a screenshot, not meant to be parsed. restore reads session.json in the current directory by default, or a path you give it; --dry-run shows what it would do without launching anything.

restore refuses to run if the target workspace already has windows — it never merges or clobbers. If some windows can't be matched within 5 seconds (app didn't start in time, binary went missing) it logs a warning, places everything it could, and exits non-zero so scripts can detect a partial restore.

# On workspace 1: a browser on the left, a terminal on the right $ tileroot dump -o ~/.config/tileroot/work.json # ...reboot, or close everything... $ tileroot restore ~/.config/tileroot/work.json 2 of 2 windows restored License note on i3-resurrect i3-resurrect is GPLv3, which is not compatible with this project's MIT license — no code from it is used here. tileroot 's sway/i3 backend is a clean-room implementation against the public i3-ipc wire protocol specification (the framing and message types sway/i3 themselves document, not i3-resurrect 's source), and the window-matching logic is independently designed.

restore launches processes from the saved cmdline in your session file. Because sharing session files (dotfiles, "here's my rice") is exactly what this tool is for, cmdline is stored as an argument array and executed directly via posix_spawn — never through a shell. A session file with something like ["echo", "; rm -rf ~"] in it prints that string literally; it does not run rm . See test_matcher.cpp::test_spawn_does_not_shell_interpret_cmdline for the regression test that guards this.

Hyprland backend: live-validated. Written against and tested end-to-end against a real running Hyprland 0.56 session — dump , --pretty , atomic -o writes, schema validation, and the wm-mismatch/occupied-workspace refusal paths all confirmed working against real windows. Sway/i3 backend ( I3ProtocolBackend ): written against the public i3-ipc/sway-ipc specification, not yet validated against a live sway session. The wire protocol framing and JSON tree-walking logic are unit-testable and covered by the socket-framing code path, but end-to-end validation against a real sway instance is a known open item — see the repo's tracked next steps. i3 support: not yet wired up (it reuses I3ProtocolBackend — same protocol as sway — so it's expected to be a small addition once sway is validated live, not a rewrite). Multi-monitor on Hyprland: not specifically validated. Single-monitor is the tested case. Scratchpad windows (sway/i3): not yet captured — the scratchpad workspace's tree shape needs live validation before this backend trusts it. None of this is silent — every gap above is either a loud error at runtime or a documented limitation, never a quiet wrong answer.

Lines of C++ (core + tests) 1,683 Test functions / assertions 14 / 36 Runtime dependencies 1 ( nlohmann/json , header-only) Binary size (release, unstripped) 433 KB Binary size (stripped) 355 KB Compiler warnings ( -Wall -Wextra ) 0 Shells that never see your cmdline all of them (see Security ) Design-review rounds before implementation 3 rounds, 14 issues caught before a line of code existed License MIT — see LICENSE .