Decided to try writing a Wayland compositor for fun.

I'm still working on niri btw (and using it myself too). Today I finally finished a window layout refactor that was due from very early on.

Now the layout always works correctly, with all the paddings, struts, fullscreen windows and animations. It's tricky because while most of the logic operates only on the "working area" (view excluding struts), fullscreen windows in particular must cover the entire view area, while otherwise acting as just another regular window column.

niri development is ongoing, getting a lot of help from kchibisov too.

Today I implemented an interactive area screenshot capture tool. Almost like a mini screenshot UI

Decided to make a new demo video for niri, finally. The last one was so old that niri didn't even have cursors implemented, it showed an orange rectangle instead. 🫠

Here's the link again for the curious: https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri

Very happy I've come this far writing my own compositor from scratch. Honestly thought my motivation would only last for two weeks max, but here we are.

Learned a ton in the process, and now this experience helps me with Mutter & Shell profiling.

#rust

The development pace had slowed down a little, so I've tagged an alpha release for niri: https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/releases/tag/v0.1.0-alpha.1

Also made a COPR for the occasion, if you're on Fedora: https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/yalter/niri/

A month has passed and a number of important additions have landed in niri, so here's a second alpha release: https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/releases/tag/v0.1.0-alpha.2

Highlights include relative-pointer and pointer-constraints which let Xwayland masterfully handle 3D games mouse look, and popup unconstraining which prevents popups from opening off-screen. I actually made popups place within their window with some padding, which looks quite nice.

#rust #wayland

Aaahhhhhh another difficult refactor down and niri now does multi-GPU! By which I mean that monitors plugged into secondary GPUs will now light up and work. All the screenshot UI and screencast portal stuff also works just fine. Wouldn't be able to do this as quickly without Smithay's MultiRenderer support and lots of help from @drakulix

I went for the easier strat of always rendering on the primary GPU, but you can also pick render GPU dynamically, which apparently cosmic-comp does, cool!

Tagged niri v0.1.0-alpha.3 with multi-GPU support, borders and other improvements! Multi-GPU was one of the bigger things I wanted to get done before going out of alpha so I guess I'm slowly getting there.

https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/releases/tag/v0.1.0-alpha.3

Turns out that if you implement xdg-decoration in your compositor but tell clients that you want CSD, then SDL2 + libdecor clients will break due to a bug. The bug is already fixed, but the fix hasn't made it to any SDL2 release yet, let alone all the runtimes and vendored copies.

Hiding xdg-decoration from clients it is then

#wayland #sdl

I added text rendering to niri using pangocairo, which turned out to be surprisingly simple. It basically "just worked". This unlocks a lot of features, beginning with a hotkey overlay, which should help people get started (suggested by @ju).

I've tagged niri 0.1.0-beta.1 which includes the overlay along with many more improvements: https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/releases/tag/v0.1.0-beta.1

I'm now happy enough with the feature set so in a week I'll release 0.1.0. Time to finally catch up on other projects I've been neglecting.

I'm pretty excited to finally be able to "release" niri soon but god I'm glad I set aside a beta week for bugfixes. We already stumbled upon and fixed several issues

A few latency tests before release confirm that niri's still doing good (at least on idle; I don't have any repaint scheduling yet but on idle it doesn't matter). The compositors are pretty much within the noise threshold from each other. Except some sway fullscreen bug and Shell losing one frame somewhere.

Well, I'm happy to release the first stable version of niri, my scrollable-tiling compositor: https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/releases/tag/v0.1.0

Very satisfied with the current state, even though there's plenty left to do. Took a lot of time and work but I've certainly learned a lot, and I'm glad to have contributed a bit to Smithay too!

#wayland #rust #smithay

Before adding more animations into niri, I'm making a "visual tests" application. It shows a set of hardcoded scenarios which I can quickly go through and visually check that everything looks right.

It uses solid color rectangles as "windows", but otherwise this is the real niri layout code and real niri + Smithay rendering code, drawing to a GTK GL area.

For example, on the last test you can see that my offscreen code currently clips CSD shadows (during the open animation).

visual tests are such a lifesaver, so glad I stole that idea from osu!lazer

The window opening animation is now live as part of niri v0.1.2: https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/releases/tag/v0.1.2

I'm really looking forward to more animations, but wow they sure do need a lot of care to get right in all the edge cases.

Also, I added a way to programmatically invoke compositor actions, and turns out that's quite useful for making video demos!

#wayland #rust #smithay

For a bit of fun I added gradient borders to niri. One of the visual tests for it turned out a bit mesmerizing to look at

Tagged niri v0.1.3: https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/releases/tag/v0.1.3

This one has much improved touchpad gestures with inertia, springs, rubberbanding and everything else I copied from libadwaita, my primary source for things that feel good

Also thanks @alice for helping and giving feedback on the gestures and for giving a try to the touch support!

#wayland #rust #smithay

Just implemented something I've had in mind for a while: compositor-side blocking out of windows from screencasts! The compositor is the perfect place to do this since it can replace the window contents in the render tree, which will work fine with any kind of overlapping, transparency, etc. AND it will work with anything that records the screen through the portal, be it OBS or video meeting, or whatever.

There's actually an important edge case here: if you open the screenshot UI while recording the monitor, then the screenshot UI preview will show the window, and OBS, recording the screenshot UI preview, will hence also show the window. There are trade-offs here for how you want this to work; for now I put a big warning around the option, and added a stricter mode that blocks out the window from ANY screen capture (which means you can't screenshot it).

I think for the built-in screenshot UI this is solvable with one more layer of indirection (render the screenshot UI preview itself twice, once for screencasts, and once for the monitor). However, for third-party screenshot annotation tools, this will still be a problem.