Wayland on CuriousCoding

Detached fullscreen in Sway

Fri, 02 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0200

Backlinks: PR for Sway | AUR package sway-inhibit-fullscreen-git

Once upon a time, Chromium had a bug where using $mod+f in i3 to fullscreen the Chromium window changed the window to occupy the entire screen, but didn’t actually make Chromium enter full screen mode. According to some, those¹ were² the³ good⁴ days⁵^,⁶. Watching 4 YouTube streams in parallel was still possibly, back in those days:

Without patches, the best we can do nowadays⁷ is the following

Wayland utilities

Fri, 02 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0200

This post goes over some useful utilities I have been using on my Wayland system.

Screen brightness: `light` Link to heading

Light is a nice tool to manage screen and keyboard brightness.

Install light
Add your user to the video group: usermod -aG video <user>

I really like the light -T flag, which multiplies the current brightness by some value. This way you can have fine grained control both for very low and very high brightness values. To prevent yourself from decreasing the brightness all the way to 0, you can run e.g. light -N 0.2 to set a minimium screen brightness of 0.2. This value will be stored in your config directory under ~/.config/light/.

Window switching in Sway

Thu, 01 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0200

Sway has many commands for switching the active workspace and focused window. However, I find that most of my window switching comes down to a few simple commands that focus a specific application, or open it first when it has no open windows yet. E.g.:

$mod+s: open and/or focus slack
$mod+i: open and/or focus signal
$mod+m: open and/or focus emacs
$mod+c: open and/or focus chromium

In addition to this, some apps like emacs have a separate $mod+Shift+m command that always opens a new window/instance.

Clean your homedir with XDG Base Dir

Wed, 30 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0200

Links: XDG specification | ArchWiki | Reddit post

In case you are, like me, tired of applications polluting your homedir with config and data files, the XDB Base Directory Specification (ArchWiki) has your back.

You probably saw the ~/.config directory already, and in fact, many programs can be told to use this directory instead of polluting your homedir. The ArchWiki page has a list of many applications and which environment variables need to be set to change the location of their configuration.

Environment variables done once

Wed, 30 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0200

Links: GitHub issue

One problem I had with my Sway setup is that setting environment variables in my config.fish (the Fish equivalent to .bashrc or .zshrc) is not always sufficient.

In particular, I need my environment variables to be available in at least the following places:

my Fish shell,
applications launched from Sway (e.g. using keybindings),
applications launched as a systemd service (e.g. the Emacs server daemon).

Setting variables in the shell profile has the problem that they are not picked up by systemd services. Another option seems to be ~/.pam_environment, but this is deprecated.

X1 Extreme Gen 3 - Migrating to Wayland

Sun, 16 May 2021 00:00:00 +0200

I got a new laptop, so this felt like the right time to migrate to Wayland.

Delta Link to heading

what	before	after
hardware
laptop	Asus UX501V	Lenovo X1 Extreme Gen 3
CPU	i7-6700HQ	i7-10750H
GPU	GTX 960M	GTX 1650
RAM	16GB	64GB
OS
bootloader	Grub	EFISTUB
OS	Windows + Arch dualboot	Windows + Arch dualboot
networking	netctl	systemd-networkd
dns/dhcp	dhcpcd	systemd-resolved
wifi	wpa_supplicant	iwd
Wayland
display/login manager	-	-
display server	X	Wayland
window manager	i3	Sway
bar	i3blocks	waybar
backlight	xbacklight	light
night mode	redshift	gammastep
clipboard	-	wl-clipboard, clipman
program launcher	rofi	rofi [wayland]
password finder	rofi-pass	rofi-pass-git
key remapping	setxkbmap, xcape, xmodmap	interception-tools
Tools
terminal emulator	urxvt	foot
shell	zsh	fish
shell highlighting	zsh-syntax-highlight	-
environment variables	.zshrc	environment.d
text editor	vim	emacs doom
aur helper	packer	yay
directory usage	du	dust
password manager	pass	pass
search tool	ag [silver searcher]	ag + ripgrep + fd
file browser	terminal	terminal + ranger
calculator	qalc	qalc, rofi-calc
notification deamon	dunst	mako
image viewer	feh	feh + sxiv
music	-	spotifyd + spotify-tui + waybar custom/media
screenshot	teiler+scrot	grimshot (from sway) + custom upload wrapper
wallpaper	feh	sway
messenger	slack, signal-desktop	slack, signal-desktop [wayland]
system monitor	htop	htop
remote shell	ssh	ssh
browser	chromium	chromium
pdf viewer	zathura	zathura
vpn	-	openconnect

see also the i3 -> sway migration guide.