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Top-level
 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. 58 comments
Niri 0.1.6 with interactive window resizing, rounded corners, named workspaces, mouse view scrolling, animation custom shaders, screen transition! https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/releases/tag/v0.1.6 Didn't realize quite how many release notes there would be this time; even had to use an extra level of headings. 😅 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. 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. 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. 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. 😅 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.. niri v0.1.7 is out with fractional scaling, window screencasts and many smaller improvements! 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 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! 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. 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). 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! 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 Spent a better part of today, but I've got dmabuf modifier negotiation fully working in my pipewire screencasting code in niri! This happens to finally fix screencasting on NVIDIA GPUs. Still haven't got any GStreamer pipeline working though, maybe needs a pipewire update. Apparently, my AMD selects a BGRA format modifier that has two planes. Some out of band info I suppose. And on Intel a preferred BGRA modifier has three entire planes! My Wayland compositor, niri, turns one today! :ablobcatrave: Here's v0.1.8 with bind key repeat, screenshot UI pointer toggle, gradient color spaces, wlr screencopy v3 and output management, and lots of other improvements: https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/releases/tag/v0.1.8 omg, my friend drew a birthday nirik :blobcataww: i recorded a demo video for the focus-follows-mouse section to showcase it lol Several days and a lot of hair pulling later, I *think* I got resize transactions working?? Maybe? Hopefully? Resize transactions is when all windows that must resize together, resize together, with no mismatching frames in between. For example, all windows in a column must add up to the full screen height. This requires correct configure acks on the client (looking at you, Blender) and very careful state update delaying and resize throttling on the compositor side. narrator: there was still one case where it didn't work due to a bug okay, surely this time it definitely works for all correctly written clients Here's one mainly for people who disable animations: window closing now runs in a transaction with the other windows resizing. This means, no background flicker. There's been another logo discussion in the niri Matrix room with some quite interesting concepts emerging. Here's one by Endg4me_ with edits by bluelinden and myself, and inspiration from a concept by ElKowar. What do you think? I'm working on an "event stream" IPC for niri where you get notified about events as they happen. For example, "workspace switched" or "keyboard layout changed". To give it a good test, I actually started implementing native niri support in Waybar. You can give it a try too: https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/pull/453#issuecomment-2317110904 I finished the initial event stream IPC implementation for niri. My Waybar fork implements a decent amount of the modules niri/workspaces, niri/window, niri/language. Please give that a try, also anyone who makes IPC scripts or bars please give a try to the event stream IPC itself so we can find any design flaws before merging. The PR you will need: https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/pull/453#issuecomment-2321730996 Waybar fork is linked from there. Set up CI rustdoc publishing for niri-ipc: https://yalter.github.io/niri/niri_ipc/ This has the entirety of the niri IPC documented, including the new event stream events. After the Waybar maintainer speedran merging my niri modules and releasing, I would feel bad delaying any longer, so here's niri 0.1.9 :) Event stream IPC for bars, better window resizing, properly named outputs, on-demand VRR, out-of-the-box fix for NVIDIA flickering, and other improvements! Made interactive move work on touch (and resize too while I was at it), didn't need that many changes actually Added a bit of rubberbanding before the window is "dragged out" of the layout. Should help avoid unintended layout changes. Along with a few more fixes I did, I think interactive move should be good to merge? It's not 100% perfect and jank free, but I'm fairly sure I got all the important things done. Will give it some more testing. Suddenly, @drakulix showcasing the Cosmic session running on, among other compositors, niri! On the big screen at the Ubuntu Summit 😄 somehow this touch moving under stationary pointer works better than i expected (yes trying to do a precise left click with an elbow was difficult) By the way! I'll be giving a talk at RustCon in Moscow on December, 6! :ablobcatwave: Wherein I will briefly describe what a Wayland compositor is, and then show several testing and profiling workflows that I've been using to keep niri stable, robust and performant. (The invitation to submit a talk was completely unexpected, guess niri found its way into the right eyes. 😅) There will be a recording, though in Russian. Interactive window moving, laptop lid and tablet mode switch binds, mouse and touchpad scroll speed setting in today's niri v0.1.10 release! https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/releases/tag/v0.1.10 Also, niri-ipc is now on crates.io, but keep in mind that it will not be Rust-semver-stable: https://crates.io/crates/niri-ipc Added scaffolding for layer rules, along with a block-out-from rule. Now you can finally block notifications from screencasts! Though, layer-shell surfaces don't have a "geometry" so if they have shadows or transparent padding, all of that becomes solid black, since niri has no way to know where the "actual content" of the layer surface is (that's what geometry is for windows). Thanks to Christian Meissl's fix in Smithay, the git version of niri correctly shows nested pop-up menus in lxqt-panel. They also submitted a fix for invalid pop-up spawning to ironbar, which makes it work on Smithay compositors. Somehow, a small change for tests escalated into trying to completely refactor how animation timing works in niri. And right now I find myself at the exact opposite of this picture. Unfortunately, time has not stopped and is causing problems Like three complete refactors later, I think it's... working? For real this time? No weird issue is gonna sneak up that undermines the whole design? Nothing seems to have caught on fire after one more day of personal testing and one more day in main. So here's a technical page I wrote about the the new niri animation timing design and its motivations: https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/wiki/Animation-Timing Today I merged a PR by FluxTape which adds "always empty workspace before first" to niri. At the surface this is just a simple config flag with obvious behavior, but it's actually full of edge cases! Things like which workspace to focus at startup. The code refers to workspaces by index in many places, and those all shift when you suddenly insert an empty workspace at index 0. Took several days to catch them all even with our randomized tests, but I think it should be good now. >did a +4,657 −4,237 refactor in the layout code This morning was my niri (-adjacent) talk! :ablobcatbongo: Went really well, got many interesting questions! They promised us video recordings in a few days, so I'll post a link when I get it. Though of course the talk is in Russian.  Turns out, there's a lot of details to get right when implementing a floating window space. For example, dialog windows should always show above their parent window. Otherwise, it's easy to lose them under the (usually much bigger) parent. The WIP floating branch in niri now handles this properly, even for xdg-desktop-portal dialogs (like file chooser) as long as the app correctly parents them via xdg-foreign. Another piece of the floating puzzle: keeping windows on screen. When you change your monitor scale or resolution, you don't want your floating windows to suddenly go unreachable behind the monitor's new borders. Here I'm resizing a nested niri with three windows, simulating resolution changes. No matter what I do, they always remain partially visible and reachable. Even for more unusual cases like trying to resize a window into out of bounds. No video yet (soon tm) but my talk got rated first among all 9 Moscow RustCon talks :blobcat: And they uploaded photos from the conference. Sidenote, for the Wayland diagram from the first pic, I took inspiration from @drakulix's one from her great "Why YOU should write a Wayland compositor" talk: https://youtu.be/FUif2GxwgBc Definitely check it out! |
Gregory's Server
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