I kept my promise! Last month I said I’d try to publish a non-status-update article, and I did! I’m not used to writing articles yet, so it takes quite some time, but I’ll do my best to improve. Let me know if you have specific article ideas in mind you’d be interested in.

This month we’ve published sway 1.0-beta.1, and we’ve mostly focused on bug fixes. For instance, I’ve finally figured out why transparency was broken on Xwayland (this is a one year-old bug, full story). I’ve also fixed multi-GPU support by setting it up on my laptop.

Apart from bug fixes, I’ve worked on a few new features too. swayidle, the daemon responsible for taking actions when the compositor enters idle state, is now able to enter immediately idle state. To do so, you just need to send the SIGUSR1 signal. This allows for instance to turn off screens when locking the session (example config).

The Wayland presentation-time protocol has also been implemented in sway. I’ve been discussing with mpv folks to use it to improve playback.

Finally, I’ve started work for what I call Xcursor configuration. You might have noticed that cursor sizes across Wayland apps are not consistent: GTK+ and sway use a 24px cursor while Qt, Weston and GLFW use a 32px one. It’s also not possible to change the cursor theme, the default cursor, or to use different settings for each seat. To fix this, I’ve been discussing with people from GNOME, Qt and Wayland to build a solution. The idea would be to design a new protocol and implement it in libwayland-cursor so that everybody can use it without any major changes. All of this is still work-in-progress.

I have some mrsh news too! First, we have a new cool domain name: mrsh.sh. New builtins have been added by delthas and readline/libedit support has been implemented by sircmpwn. The latter is optional and enables a much friendlier user interface. You can now use arrow keys to edit the current command or navigate in the history! I’ve worked on arithmetic expressions, the groundwork for the parser has been done but it still needs some more love.

Speaking of new websites, I actually have one additional new website: wayland.emersion.fr. A list of the Wayland tools I’m maintaining is there. I might expand this website with more Wayland development content, such as testing tools and blog articles.

The mako notification daemon has received some updates thanks to great contributors. Criteria has been improved to be more flexible, it should now be possible to override size, margins and actions. Notification body parsing has been fixed for clients that don’t support markup (ie. HTML-like formatting). Directional padding and showing notifications on the top or bottom center of the screen are now supported. Thanks to the elogind people we now support non-systemd systems.

That’s all I have for today! In the next month I’ll try to continue working on improving laptop dock and multi-GPU support in wlroots, fixing issues with arithmetic expressions in mrsh. Maybe I’ll have a go at implementing job control, if I understand which black magic incantations I should use (help welcome if you know about this!). I’ll definitely try to publish another technical article, I need to get better at this. Thanks for reading!