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

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.

Ivan Molodetskikh

Fixed transparency support. Turns out the BGRA format should've been in a separate pod, rather than as a choice in the same pod. Should've looked at Mutter code sooner as usual..

Ivan Molodetskikh

niri v0.1.7 is out with fractional scaling, window screencasts and many smaller improvements!

Release v0.1.7 · YaLTeR/niri

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

GitHub (github.com)

#niri #smithay #wayland #rust

Ivan Molodetskikh

Apparently there's a cool Pango flag that enables subpixel glyph positioning which makes things scale smoother and improves kerning! Thanks Benjamin (the GTK maintainer) for the suggestion

Ivan Molodetskikh

Oops, looks like niri had outstarred PaperWM on GitHub

PaperWM introduced me to (and made me fall in love with) scrollable tiling. It's a solid implementation on top of GNOME, so you get all the benefits of running a stable and well-supported DE (and Xwayland). PaperWM is also a very direct inspiration for many parts of niri!

GitHub - paperwm/PaperWM: Tiled scrollable window management for Gnome Shell

Tiled scrollable window management for Gnome Shell - paperwm/PaperWM

GitHub (github.com)

Ivan Molodetskikh

Implemented the thing where you can toggle the mouse pointer on the screenshot after the fact (by pressing P). Gonna add a help panel here soon to remind you of this.

#niri

Ivan Molodetskikh

Much better

#niri

Ivan Molodetskikh

key repeat + scrollable tiling = fun

#niri

Ivan Molodetskikh

One of the niri users has contributed a gradient interpolation color space setting! Now you can do pretty gradient borders in srgb-linear, oklab and oklch (in all four hue directions).

#niri

Ivan Molodetskikh

I made a COPR for git builds of niri: https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/yalter/niri-git

Apparently this is a thing you can do; relatively easily, even. It's fully automatic, triggers on a webhook from GitHub.

Thanks Michael (my4ng) from our Matrix channel for showing me the relevant docs and doing the initial work!

#niri

Ivan Molodetskikh

niri has reached 3000 stars yesterday!

Ivan Molodetskikh

also in an act of severe procrastination i decided to try drawing a diagram of the redraw state machine: https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/wiki/Redraw-Loop