Finally made the switch from alacritty to kitty. I have been thinking about this for a while. Both, fundamentally, serve my purposes just fine. Both are fast, customizable, gpu accelerated, and so on. Kitty feels a little faster on the input, but this should not provide major differences. One big difference, however, is now very apparent and I can feel it: Alacritty, on wayland, does not support any picture preview. It does not support sixel, and things like w3mimg or ueberzug are based on and require X11 to run. Kitty brings its own graphics display library and it seems both pretty stable and fast. I have not done much more with it than use it in things like vifm image previews but it should be much more stable than things like ueberzug, much faster than things like sixel. Time will tell. Switched other modules to make use of kitty instead of alacritty: vifm uses kitty previews, river spawns kitty instances, systemd units use kitty instances, waybar presents extra mouse-click interactions through kitty, and styler contains a processor to style kitty permanently. I would love to converge this all a bit more on the `$TERMINAL` env var, but this is unfortunately difficult for things like systemd and waybar. For waybar I currently see no real way except for a custom `ideal-terminal` script which just goes down the list of terminal emulators I want to run, depending on which is installed, since it does not read env vars, while for systemd it might be feasible to import user environment variables, but also connected to additional complexity and overhead which it does not seem worth for the currently two simple service units it affects. Also removed some obsolete sxhkd and sh settings from the move to wayland.
4.7 KiB
wayland
My first foray into wayland is based on river, a tiling window manager somewhat based on bspwm.
This is only a very work-in-progress README file.
Since wayland handles key presses and so on completely differently from X, I can't for example use sxhkd anymore which is a shame.
On the other hand, there is an amazing key re binding tool
(which also works under X I've now found out)
keyd
which takes care of some X functionality (xcape) at a lower level.
I have not found a good replacement for clutter
(which automatically hides your mouse cursor after inactivity)
which is independent from the window manager.
I believe swaywm
would include similar functionality, but river
does not.
Missing
not set up:
- lockscreen
- power menu -- rofi on X
- extensive run menu (clipboard, open windows) -- rofi on X
- clipboard manager
- pass frontend dropdown -- clipboard and xdotool
- investigate wtype over ydotool
- file uploading (works but without url clipboard)
- open_download (qutebrowser script)
- gap regulation
- brightnessctl
- waybar and various status modules
- include waybar in styler settings
- pacman new packages in status
- personal keyboard layout (ae, oe, ue, ..)
- styler
- still works as before, only less programs respect xresources settings
- works even for foot, if I want to switch to it
- need to set it up for waybar
- dropdown terminal and dropdown todo
- rofimoji emoji dropdown -- clipboard
- show current mode
- [-] hide cursor
- dropdown calculator -- rofi on X -- could use
qalc
directly - [-] modes: media, academia (worth?)
- picture in terminal, a-la ueberzug
- ueberzug is X only
- there is sixel rendering for foot, st, xterm, urxvt
- alacritty does not support sixel rendering yet, see also existing sixel implementation.
- We have sixel support enabled in vifm and foot. It is very wonky, however.
- Switched to kitty terminal for image support instead
undecided
- polybar -> waybar / yambar
- foot / alacritty
River
River is set up to come close to my old i3 setup. Of course, some mappings are different (especially those for movement between windows), but overall the keys map to the old ones.
Since the window manager now also takes over the task of compositor
and does not pass through all keys to all programs,
it takes over the role of sxhkd
as well and summons other programs.
I am not entirely sure how I feel about this bundling of tasks into one application, but so far it works. Since river is also, mimicking bspwm, using an executable file (any executable file) as its configuration file it is also reasonable that the setup can be tamed and refactored better than a single i3 configuration file.
Waybar
Waybar replaces the old polybar setup.
It displays the first 10 tags on its left, with tags highlighted that are either occupied by windows or currently in focus. In the center it displays a clock which can be clicked to open a simple calendar.
To the right is where most of the info modules are: If there are upcoming events listed for the khal application, it will display a calendar module here. If music is playing through an mpris-compatible player, its status is shown here. If a connection through wireguard or over a vpn tunnel is established, it is shown here. Then, from left to right, audio, brightness, wifi, cpu, ram, temperature, and battery information are displayed.
Some displays have alternative display states, with for example the battery showing remaining time and ram information showing used and total available.
Clicking on:
- audio opens pulsemixer
- network opens nmtui
- cpu opens top (or glances on right-click)
- temperature shows sensors
keyd
keyd is set up within /etc/
and not in the dotfiles themselves.
If using the included ./install.sh
file, there is an option to also set up files outside the home directory, including keyd options.
It is configured through /etc/keyd/default.cfg
.
Currently, it takes care of mapping capslock
to both control and escape (depending on if its used alone or with other keys),
as well as adding some German characters that I am otherwise missing on my en_US keyboard.
Lastly, it allows easy clipboard pasting with the insert
key.
Swaybg
swaybg
is used to set the wallpaper from the river configuration file.