Sway is a tiling window manager and Wayland compositor, inspired by i3, and written in C.[3] Sway is designed as a drop-in replacement for i3 using the more modern Wayland display server protocol and wlroots compositor library.

[4] Sway works with existing i3 configuration files and supports most of i3's features while providing several new features of its own.

[5] Sway's default controls for manipulating windows are similar to vi.

Like i3, Sway can be extended and manipulated using its Unix domain socket and JSON-based IPC interface from many programming languages.

[7] Sway's first stable release was on March 11, 2019, after 3.6 years of development.