Years ago I was a fan of ratpoison and i3. Today, I'm trying to use sway. I think my biggest problem right now is that the pipe/backslash key works like a </> key. How weird is that. Maybe some weird key binding that is coming back to haunt me. Caps Lock is no longer the Compose Key and that makes me sad.
Got Caps Lock working as the Compose key, so that's great. The answer was to specify xkb_options compose:caps for the keyboard input. But getting the less key instead of the backslash key remains a problem. xev shows "keycode 94 (keysym 0x3c, less)" for the key in question. If only I knew the name of a variant that would immediately change that to backslash.