Right now there's:
- inverse dynamic tiling
- dynamic config with lua in development
- keyboard and keybinding config in lua
Some configuration is done by editing config.h and recompiling, in the same manner as dwm. There is no way to separately restart the window manager in Wayland without restarting the entire display server, so any changes will take effect the next time blendage is executed.
You can also edit ~/.config/blend/rc.lua and set variable with the same names as in config.h with the function set_var
As the author could not have been bothered to implement monitor config (he tried, look at f1f8d631be6bdc61b19e727d7b87199971dd8fb0), please use wlr-randr to configure monitors.
Belndage can be run on any of the backends supported by wlroots. This means you can run it as a separate window inside either an X11 or Wayland session, as well as directly from a VT console. Depending on your distro's setup, you may need to add your user to the video and input groups before you can run blendage on a VT.
When blend is run with no arguments, it will launch the server and begin handling any shortcuts configured in config.h and ~/.config/blend/rc.lua. There is no status bar or other decoration initially; these are instead clients that can be run within the Wayland session.
If you would like to run a script or command automatically at startup, you can specify the command using the -s option. This command will be executed as a shell command using /bin/sh -c. It serves a similar function to .xinitrc, but differs in that the display server will not shut down when this process terminates. Instead, blend will send this process a SIGTERM at shutdown and wait for it to terminate (if it hasn't already). This makes it ideal for execing into a user service manager like s6, anopa, runit, or systemd --user.
Note: The -s command is run as a child process of blend, which means that it does not have the ability to affect the environment of blend or of any processes that it spawns. If you need to set environment variables that affect the entire blendage session, these must be set prior to running blendage. For example, Wayland requires a valid XDG_RUNTIME_DIR, which is usually set up by a session manager such as elogind or systemd-logind. If your system doesn't do this automatically, you will need to configure it prior to launching blend, e.g.:
export XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=/tmp/xdg-runtime-$(id -u)
mkdir -p $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR
blend
Blendage is a compact, hackable compositor for Wayland based on wlroots. It is intended to fill the same space in the Wayland world that dwm does in X11, primarily in terms of philosophy, and secondarily in terms of functionality. Like dwm, blendage is:
-
Easy to understand, hack on, and extend with patches
-
One C source file (or a very small number) configurable via
config.h -
Limited to 2000 SLOC to promote hackability
-
Tied to as few external dependencies as possible
-
Any features provided by dwm/Xlib: simple window borders, tags, keybindings, client rules, mouse move/resize.
-
Configurable multi-monitor layout support, including position and rotation
-
Configurable HiDPI/multi-DPI support
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Idle-inhibit protocol which lets applications such as mpv disable idle monitoring
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Provide information to external status bars via stdout/stdin
-
Urgency hints via xdg-activate protocol
-
Support screen lockers via input-inhibitor protocol
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Various Wayland protocols
-
XWayland support as provided by wlroots (can be enabled in
config.mk) -
Zero flickering - Wayland users naturally expect that "every frame is perfect"
-
Layer shell popups (used by Waybar)
-
Damage tracking provided by scenegraph API
Features under consideration (possibly as patches) are:
- Protocols made trivial by wlroots
- Client-side decoration
- Animations and visual effects
- implement a socket server so as to support sway workspaces and keyboard layout
Blendage has three dependencies: lua, wlroots and wayland-protocols. Simply install these (and their -devel versions if your distro has separate development packages) and run make.
To disable XWayland, you should also install xorg-xwayland and comment its flag in config.mk.
Information about selected layouts, current window title, and selected/occupied/urgent tags is written to the stdin of the -s command (see the printstatus() function for details). This information can be used to populate an external status bar with a script that parses the information. Failing to read this information will cause blendage to block, so if you do want to run a startup command that does not consume the status information, you can close standard input with the <&- shell redirection, for example:
blend -s 'foot --server <&-'
If your startup command is a shell script, you can achieve the same inside the script with the line
exec <&-
Existing dwl-specific status bars and dwl-specific scripts for other status bars include:
- somebar status bar designed for dwl
- dtaobarv2.sh for use with dtao (See "Pinned Messages" on the "customizations" channel of the dwl Discord server for details.)
- dwlbar.sh for use with waybar (See "Pinned Messages" on the "customizations" channel of the dwl Discord server for details.)
- waybar-dwl for use with waybar
- dwl-tags.sh for use with yambar
- waybar-dwl.sh for use with waybar (ACCESS TO THIS SCRIPT REQUIRES gitee.com LOGIN!)
You can find a list of Wayland applications on the sway wiki.