Mango 0.17.3 adds a fix for stubborn fullscreen windows and a little focus dimming
Mango, the "dwm for Wayland" compositor, ships two small features and a batch of fixes, five days after its last release.
Mango, the open-source Wayland compositor that bills itself as dwl with more of everything, just put out version 0.17.3. Maintainer DreamMaoMao published it today and on paper it's a modest update. Two features land, plus a cluster of fixes for annoyances people actually hit. It's the sort of update you only feel when it's gone.
The headline is a new global option called float_full_to_top, and it does precisely what the name implies. Keep in mind that this has been a long-standing gripe in lightweight compositors for years. Without it, a floating calculator or clipboard manager can get wedged under a fullscreen game or video, leaving you fighting the stacking order all afternoon. Flip on the new option, and floating, fullscreen, and layer-shell top windows share a single layer, so whichever you raised last wins.
It mirrors a similar setting in Hyprland, which won't surprise anyone who's juggled both.
Two features, both pragmatic
The second addition is focus-based dimming. Mango already had a dim overlay that shades a window's content without touching its real opacity, so this just adds the ability to dim focused and unfocused windows differently. Unfocused windows get a dim of roughly a third opacity by default, focused stays transparent, so you always know what's active. The overlay never swallows pointer input, and it rides along with the window during animations.
Not exactly the most feature-packed release in history. But the project's own README puts it bluntly: features get added when they genuinely improve daily workflows, not for the sake of completeness.
The fixes are equally workmanlike. Tag animations got tidied up, and a keycode binding issue that forced people to lean on a binds workaround is fixed, so that trick is no longer necessary. There's a fix for dangling pointers that could surface during config hot-reloads, plus a screen-sharing repair for the Wemeet video app — a specific pain point tied to how Wayland handles screenshots.
The timing is the real story
What stands out here isn't the features so much as the pace. Look at the 0.17.x timeline: 0.17.0 on September 12, then 0.17.1, 0.17.2, and now 0.17.3. Four releases in the first ten days of the series.
And 0.17.3 sits only one commit ahead of main. The previous release, 0.17.2, lagged by 25 commits and came complete with a note about fixing crashes and memory leaks. This one is current, even.
For context, Mango now holds roughly 3,700 stars, about 245 forks, 154 open issues, and 71 open pull requests, with 2,119 commits in the bank. It's GPL-3.0 and runs largely on one person's shoulders, DreamMaoMao, backed by a Discord server and a wiki that most of it doesn't write. It's a bit concerning that the "single-maintainer" label on a project this widely used isn't more of a talking point, but it's also how much of the best Wayland tooling gets built.
Who's behind the code
Mango credits wlroots, dwl, and the scenefx window-effects library among its foundations, with animation groundwork from owl and a protocol reference from sway. DreamMaoMao runs the show and takes sponsorship from people like dl09r, tonybanters, vinthara, and stepbrobd, plus cryptocurrency donations complete with a QR code tucked into the README.
The 0.17.3 announcement landed on launch day with ten thumbs-up and six "hooray" reactions, drawing engagement from a few regular names in the community, including dl09r, who happens to be the top sponsor.
Where to get it
If you're on Arch, the git build is just yay -S mangowm-git, and a sample config lives at github.com/DreamMaoMao/mango-config. Other distros are covered by the installation guide, which lists Fedora, Gentoo, Guix, NixOS, openSUSE, PikaOS, AerynOS, and source builds. The new float_full_to_top option sits under Configuration => Miscellaneous => Window Behavior in the reference docs at mangowm.github.io.
Head here to the GitHub release page for the full notes, and check the changelog to see how much actually moved between 0.17.2 and 0.17.3.
