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

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.

Ivan Molodetskikh

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

Ivan Molodetskikh

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).

Ivan Molodetskikh

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

Ivan Molodetskikh

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

Ivan Molodetskikh

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

Ivan Molodetskikh

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 :blobmiou:

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

#wayland #rust #smithay

Ivan Molodetskikh

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.

Ivan Molodetskikh

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).

Ivan Molodetskikh

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.

Ivan Molodetskikh

Implemented this idea. It means rendering each monitor 3 times always for the screenshot but maybe it's fine? On this laptop 3 monitors × 3 renders takes 2 ms, and there's some unnecessary blocking I forgot to remove.

On the video, note how for me the screenshot UI has Secrets visible, but on the recording afterwards it's always blocked out.

Ivan Molodetskikh

I may be having too much fun recording a demo for the release notes

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