After almost a year of development, the release of the composite manager Sway 1.12 has been published, built using the Wayland protocol and compatible with the i3 tiled window manager and i3bar panel. The project code is written in C and is distributed under the MIT license. The project is aimed at use in Linux and FreeBSD.
Sway allows for logical window placement (the window manager dynamically selects the position and size of a window, taking into account other open windows and preventing overlap) instead of traditional spatial positioning (where the user selects an arbitrary place and size for a window with possible overlap). Windows are arranged in a grid, optimally utilizing screen space and enabling quick manipulation of windows using only the keyboard. Compatibility with i3 is ensured at the command, configuration file, and IPC level, allowing Sway to serve as a transparent replacement for i3, using Wayland instead of X11.
To set up a complete user environment, additional components are provided: swayidle (a background process implementing a sleep mode), swaylock (a screen locker), mako (a notification manager), grim (screenshot creation), slurp (screen area selection), wf-recorder (video capture), waybar (application panel), virtboard (on-screen keyboard), wl-clipboard (clipboard management), and wallutils (desktop wallpaper management).
Sway is evolving as a modular project built on top of the wlroots library, which provides all the basic primitives for organizing the work of a composite manager. Wlroots includes backends for
abstracting access to the screen, input devices, rendering without direct calls to OpenGL, interaction with KMS/DRM, libinput, Wayland, and X11 (providing a layer for running X11 applications through Xwayland). In addition to Sway, the wlroots library is actively used in other projects as well. In addition to support for C/C++, bindings are provided for languages such as Scheme, Common Lisp, Go, Haskell, OCaml, Zig, Python, and Rust.
In the new release:
- The ability to capture individual windows has been added.
- Support for output in high dynamic range brightness HDR10 has been implemented when using rendering based on the Vulkan API.
- Support for Wayland protocols has been added:
- color-management-v1 for color management and support for high dynamic range brightness (HDR, High Dynamic Range).
- color-representation-v1 for defining the color representation of a Wayland surface.
- xdg-toplevel-tag-v1 for attaching tags to top-level surfaces by Wayland clients, which the composite server can use to restore the position, size, and properties of windows after a restart, as well as to define special rules for individual types of windows.
- ext-workspace-v1 for creating panels or indicators that display a list of available virtual desktops and allow switching between them.
- wl_fixes for solving issues with other software interfaces of basic protocols that cannot be resolved by the capabilities of these interfaces themselves.
- An option "--device-primaries" has been implemented, whereby the color profile is formed based on data called by the monitor through EDID.
- Support has been added for detecting the presence of a keypad using the LIBINPUT_SWITCH_KEYPAD_SLIDE flag in libinput.
- The configuration file now includes bindings for special multimedia keys (pause, resume playback, next track, etc.) to control multimedia content playback using the playerctl utility.
- The output color profile srgb has been transitioned to using a piece-wise transfer function sRGB instead of gamma 2.2 (for gamma 2.2, a separate profile gamma22 should be used, which is applied by default).
- Launching on systems with unsupported GPUs (e.g., when using proprietary NVIDIA drivers) now results in a warning rather than an error shutdown. The warning can be suppressed using the flag "--unsupported-gpu" or the environment variable SWAY_UNSUPPORTED_GPU.
- Official support for using display managers to launch Sway has been added.
- New features from the wlroots 0.20 library have been utilized. Among the changes in the new version of wlroots: Support for determining the color representation of a Wayland surface, color management and HDR usage through the protocols color-representation-v1 and color-management-v1. Support for Wayland protocols cursor-shape-v1 for customizing the appearance of the cursor,
ext-workspace-v1 for utilizing the concept of virtual desktops and xdg-toplevel-tag-v1 for identifying windows/surfaces through tag bindings.
Source: opennet.ru
