My Way to Wayland

I guess everybody knows that X11 aka Xorg is a pain in the ass and a security nightmare. Therefore it shouldn’t be such a suprise that I think about switching to Wayland for a long time now. And it looks like it’s finally the day, where I can switch to wayland without effects on my convenience.

TL;DR here is the link to my dotfiles with the whole configuration: https://github.com/shibumi/dotfiles

But first let’s sum up what I need:

• Screen-recording
• Screenshots
• Screen-locking
• A nice tiling window manager
• A dmenu/rofi like menu library with a client
• A notification daemon
• Setting a background
• Setting brightness of the background

I’ve decided to go with the following setup:

• wf-recorder for screen-recording
• grim for screenshots
• swaylock for screen-locking
• sway the i3-compatible wayland compositor
• rofi as menu library. Unfortunately it’s not a native wayland application. So I hope I can replace it with something awesome in the future.
• mako as wayland-ready notification daemon
• swaybg for setting a background
• brightnessctl for setting brightness

So, how do I start sway? I’ve build a statement in my .zshrc file to start sway automatically, when I login into my TTY1:

if [ "$(tty)" = "/dev/tty1" ]; then
	exec sway
fi

My mako configuration looks like this:

font=Inconsolata 14
background-color=#151718
text-color=#9FCA56
border-color=#151718

[urgency=high]
text-color=#CD3F45

The mako configuration sets some font and color configurations on-default and a special text color for notifications with urgency high.

My sway configuration is the same as with my i3 configuration, the only difference is this specific section here:

# Setting sway specific inputs
input * xkb_layout "de"
input * xkb_variant "us"

# Setting sway specific executions
exec mako
exec swaybg -c "#151718"

This configuration will set my us/de hybrid keymap layout and will autoexecute mako and swaybg on sway start.

The next big question is:“How do I share screenshots? Record my Screen or share copypasted text?". Well, I have a solution for this as well. Here is my small shell script for sharing text via filebin:

#!/bin/bash
readonly TEXTSHOTDIR="$HOME/.cache/textshot/"

if [[ ! -e "$TEXTSHOTDIR" ]]; then
  mkdir -p "$TEXTSHOTDIR"
fi
readonly TIME="$(date +%Y-%m-%d-%H-%M-%S)"
readonly TEXTPATH="$TEXTSHOTDIR/text-$TIME.txt"
wl-paste >"$TEXTPATH"
readonly OUTPUT="$(fb "$TEXTPATH")"
wl-copy "$OUTPUT"
notify-send "Text uploaded" "$OUTPUT"

Taking a screenshot and sharing it via filebin is quite simple as well (btw feel free to fork it and modify it to your needs. All snippets are licensed under GPLv3):

#!/bin/bash
readonly SCREENSHOTDIR="$HOME/.cache/screenshot"

if [[ ! -e "$SCREENSHOTDIR" ]]; then
  mkdir -p "$SCREENSHOTDIR"
fi
readonly TIME="$(date +%Y-%m-%d-%H-%M-%S)"
readonly IMGPATH="$SCREENSHOTDIR/img-$TIME.png"
grim -g "$(slurp)" "$IMGPATH"
readonly OUTPUT="$(fb "$IMGPATH")"
wl-copy "$OUTPUT"
notify-send "Screenshot uploaded" "$OUTPUT"

And finally my solution for sharing screen recordings on the fly (this is a little bit longer):

#!/bin/bash
readonly VIDEOSHOTDIR="$HOME/.cache/videoshot"

if [[ ! -e $VIDEOSHOTDIR ]]; then
  mkdir -p "$VIDEOSHOTDIR"
fi

readonly PIDPATH="$VIDEOSHOTDIR/videoshot.pid"
readonly RESOURCEPATH="$VIDEOSHOTDIR/videoshot.txt"

if [[ ! -f "$PIDPATH" ]]; then
  readonly TIME="$(date +%Y-%m-%d-%H-%M-%S)"
  readonly VIDPATH="$VIDEOSHOTDIR/rec-$TIME.mp4"
  (
    wf-recorder -g "$(slurp)" -f "$VIDPATH" &
    echo "$!" >"$PIDPATH"
    echo "$VIDPATH" >"$RESOURCEPATH"
    notify-send "Start recording" "$VIDPATH"
    readonly PID="$(cat $PIDPATH)"
    wait "$PID"
    readonly VIDPATH="$(cat $RESOURCEPATH)"
    if [ ! -f "$VIDPATH" ]; then
      notify-send "Recording aborted"
    else
      readonly OUTPUT="$(fb "$VIDPATH")"
      wl-copy "$OUTPUT"
      notify-send "Video uploaded" "$OUTPUT"
    fi
    rm "$PIDPATH"
    rm "$RESOURCEPATH"
  ) &
else
  readonly PID="$(cat $PIDPATH)"
  kill -SIGINT "$PID"

Another topic is pasting passwords from a password manager via rofi into your current window. The tool xdotool is not available anymore, because it’s X11 only, so wayland will not support it. Luckily there seems to be someone who has created ydotool, it’s a replacement for xdotool and uses /dev/uinput as source for the inputs. However I decided against it, because installing two new libraries and ydotool was a too big hassle for me. So I just stick with copying the password into the buffer via wl-copy:

#!/bin/bash
_rofi() {
  rofi -i -no-levenshtein-sort -lines 8 "$@"
}

input=$(gopass list -f | rofi -lines 8 -dmenu -p "gopass")
printf '%s' "$(gopass show -o "$input")" | wl-copy

Note: This solution is not perfect, as well, because the output will be stored into the clipboard and the clipboard will not get cleaned up! So using ydotool is might a better solution.

If you experience problems with Java applications like, IntelliJ-IDEs, then you should put the following line in your .zshrc. or .bashrc line:

export _JAVA_AWT_WM_NONREPARENTING=1