Decided to try writing a Wayland compositor for fun. Took me a few days to get things going to a video-able state.

Ivan Molodetskikh

Amidst all the fires being put out, niri 0.1.4 which can block out windows from screencasts! https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/releases/tag/v0.1.4

And also gamma control, focus follows mouse, warp mouse to focus, wheel and touchpad scroll bindings, xdp-gnome 46 support.

Also, every single config option is now documented on the wiki! Which took like an entire week of work (even though I was reusing a lot of my previously written docs in the config). Check it out here: https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/wiki/Configuration:-Overview

#wayland #smithay #rust #niri

Ivan Molodetskikh

Today: horizontal column movement is now animated!

Ivan Molodetskikh

Took the whole yesterday and a bit of today, but I've got window closing animations working! These turned out to be tricky because they need storing a snapshot of the surface render tree to draw once the app is gone.

Some apps may start destroying their subsurfaces before the main surface, like alacritty with its sctk CSD, making it very easy to miss parts of the window in the snapshot, and therefore in the closing animation.

Also, windows closing to the left no longer shift the view!

#niri

Ivan Molodetskikh

Definitely one of the most complex animations yet: window resizing.

Just the crossfade effect itself took a while to get working with all the window geometries and buffer offsets, and then there's the whole multiple window orchestration with Wayland's asynchronous nature. (I don't do animation transactions yet, that'll be a whole other level of complexity on top.)

Happy with the result though, and it's cool that it seamlessly works with block-out-from screencast.

#niri

Ivan Molodetskikh

Window movement across columns is now animated too!

These weren't complex per se, but very *finicky*. Spent quite a bit of time chasing down all the offsets and coordinates to add and subtract to avoid jumps, but it seems to all work well now!

#niri

Ivan Molodetskikh

All the animations, plus VRR, today in niri 0.1.5: https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/releases/tag/v0.1.5

I also remade the demo video to showcase the animations and some of the newer features!

#niri #smithay #rust #wayland

Ivan Molodetskikh

We've reached 1000 commits with an a bit of an anticlimactic one though

Ivan Molodetskikh

Another tricky feature, rounded corners! Took several days, but I believe I've got a pretty complete implementation.

You (manually) set the window corner radius and whether to force-clip the window. You can set radius per-corner to match GTK 3 apps. It works correctly with subsurfaces, blocked-out windows, transparency, gradient borders, resize and other animations.

Optimization-wise, opaque regions and even overlay plane unredirection work where possible!

#niri #smithay

Ivan Molodetskikh

Also, we've now got a little #niri setup showcase thread :blobcat: https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/discussions/325

Ivan Molodetskikh

Added (stole from GNOME Shell as usual) a screen transition action, so now I can finally switch between dark and light in style

(of course, it works with blocked-out windows)

#niri

Ivan Molodetskikh

Okay, time for an actually useful feature: interactive mouse resizing (yes, finally). This was, as it goes, quite fiddly to implement, especially since niri has to negotiate with the window during the process.

I also added a double-resize-click (i.e. trigger a resize twice quickly) gesture to reset the window height or to toggle full width. Suggested by FreeFull on our Matrix and worked out very well! Really starting to feel quite nice with mouse.

(still no transactions yet)

#niri

Ivan Molodetskikh

nvim really taking its time processing all this 1000 Hz worth of resizing lol

Ivan Molodetskikh

Since I'm in a mouse gesture mood today: hooked up the horizontal touchpad swipe to Mod + middle mouse drag and omg it feels so good with the spring deceleration and all

(of course it also correctly avoids the touchpad scaling, so that when using the mouse gesture, the cursor location is always exactly anchored to the view position)

#niri

Ivan Molodetskikh

Now for something fun. I'm experimenting with the ability to set custom shaders for animations. Today I added custom shader support for window-close, which lets me make this cool falling down animation!

This is entirely optional of course, and there's no performance impact if you don't use it. Also, custom shaders, like the rest of the niri config, are live-reloaded, making it easy to play around with them.

#niri

Ivan Molodetskikh

Been fixing quite a bit of interactive resize jank and other small stuff since the last time, but also added custom shader support for window-open, thus completing it for all three main window animations (open, close, resize).

Now I didn't actually have any good idea of what I might want in a window open custom shader (I like the default), so I made a simple expanding circle animation to showcase it.

#niri

Ivan Molodetskikh

Niri 0.1.6 with interactive window resizing, rounded corners, named workspaces, mouse view scrolling, animation custom shaders, screen transition!

Release v0.1.6 · YaLTeR/niri

A scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor. Contribute to YaLTeR/niri development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHub (github.com)

Didn't realize quite how many release notes there would be this time; even had to use an extra level of headings.

#niri #smithay #rust #wayland

Ivan Molodetskikh

Over the past few weeks I've been working on fractional scaling for niri. A simple implementation took about a day, but to do it *properly* I had to refactor the entire layout code to work in floating-point.

The result is well worth it though. Borders, gaps and windows are always physical-pixel aligned, and not restricted to integer logical pixel positions. There's no blur or position-dependent +-1 px jank. Fractional-scale-aware clients remain crisp at any scale.

#niri #smithay

Ivan Molodetskikh

So it turns out that changing PipeWire screencast stream resolution on the fly is actually not that hard! Which is great news because it's required (or at least very desirable) for implementing window screencasting.

Ivan Molodetskikh

Phew, finished the initial implementation of window screencasting in niri! Complete with stream resolution change on window resizing.

Some details are still iffy regarding frame timing and frame callbacks, especially to obscured windows, but it *should* work decently fine for now.

#niri

Ivan Molodetskikh

Icons are missing in the portal dialog because apparently Shell keeps track of Wayland app ID to .desktop file mapping internally and returns the .desktop file name to the portal for it to get the icon. Which is a bit too much effort for me to replicate for now.