I’m working on a window switching tool for Wayland that’s kinda like Alt-Tab. However, it seems like there’s no compositor agnostic way to do things like:
- List all currently open windows
- Ask which window is currently focused
- Focus a specific window
Therefore, if I want my tool to support multiple compositors, I have to re-implement this logic for each compositor.
Is the motivation security through program isolation? That doesn’t quite make sense to me since programs still can do the above things, they just have to do it compositor specifically: hyprctl clients on Hyprland, niri msg windows for Niri, etc. Also, you could just have a Wayland API that requires elevated privileges for doing these things, which the user would have to opt-in to for a specific program.
I feel like this design of Wayland causes a lot of fragmentation. There are a lot of tools that are for example Hyprland-only.
Could you please enlighten me on why Wayland has this design?
Because Wayland sucks. It was designed to suck.
E: Lol at the 1:1 ratio atm.
username checks out?
Why don’t you “check out” some code that involves the ops issue and try to solve it instead of trolling people.
because i’m fine with wayland. why don’t you?
I don’t want to fix wayland. Wayland is bad.
Even if my heartfelt love for the op overcame my revulsion for wayland I would not put any effort into fixing this issue because the structural problems with wayland make it a battle with an entrenched system of powerful organizations with skin in the game and outspoken users looking for a fight as opposed to a simple pr.
Think for a second about the context of what you are aligning yourself with in these replies to me: wayland, a collection of protocols and apis in a trenchcoat, doesn’t have a standardized one for alt tab. That’s not because of a cabal of stereotypes rubbing their hands together and laughing over a meeting table shaped like the Mercator projection, but because the wayland devs abdicated responsibility by not making a reference implementation and that left space open for anyone who wanted to to stake their claim.
Now rather than looking at the design and deciding that we need 12 foot posts to support the back side of the building as the land slopes off we are at the mercy of whatever the supplier brings to the site today.
Why would I volunteer my time to that? Why would anyone?
why do you want me to spend time on that then?
Because you’re fine with wayland.
The op is flailing, trying to use the system you’re at the very least fine with but I now suspect you feel a certain affinity towards but they can’t. They can’t use wayland unless you help. Their various windows are shuffled on top of one another and require the use of a mouse to switch between. You could be helping the op instead of trolling. But you’re not.
Why are you not helping the op, umbrella?
if i’m fine with how it is, why would i help change it?
So people trying to use it could more easily do so.
Because you believe in the principles behind it and want to bring them in harmony with the ops problem.
As an action in support of the open source principles you espouse, improving the commons for no other reason than your empathy and love for the human spirit!
Works on my desktop, much better than X. What problems do you have with wayland?
The design of it is not compatible with the old paradigm of graphical interfaces which were the ones created by teams of researchers trying to figure out how to most effectively open a dialogue between computer and user. There is no reference implementation. It’s broken in a million little ways. No xscreensaver.
But if I had to name just one main thing: the whole point of wayland is to make it easier for the programmers of x to handle a large complex codebase, which they accomplished by throwing everything out and starting over from scratch instead of migrating to tools, process and even languages that make that precise problem easier to manage and at the time of waylands conception we had forty fucking years of history showing vast improvement in the tools, processes and languages aimed at big complex shit.
The fact that anyone will defend the decision to abandon x for the absolute slop delivery tube that wayland became in an age where we have access to, like it or not, the ultimate programming tool in the form of cheap and fast large language models is insane.
All time L.