Wayland in 2020

It is nearly a year since my last blog article about Wayland on Linux. Thus I thought it is time for an update on how my desktop with sway developed. What happened?

• I changed my file sharing scripts
• I moved from rofi to bemenu
• I changed my scripts, that were based on rofi

For my file sharing scripts I introduced a new helper script with the generic name share. share just uploads a file via SFTP to one of my servers and returns a link to this file. I decided to move away from using file, because I would like to be in control over my data. My old filebin provider https://paste.xinu.at has deleted uploaded files after a while. The share script depends on wl-copy, rsync, openssh and libnotify. If you want to have a look on share and the other scripts, check out my dotfiles.

The next topic is rofi. I was actually very happy with rofi, but I nevertheless decided to went away from it, because there is still no native Wayland support. So I had a look on the alternatives wofi and bemenu. Wofi looked nice, but I got turned down by their GTK dependency and their style configuration via CSS. However bemenu was not 100% pain free, too. Bemenu is unable to spawn on the current focused sway workspace. This means, if you use a multi monitor setup bemenu will always appear on the same screen.

Bemenu has a parameter flag for choosing the right sway monitor, but the format is different to the one that sway uses. Luckily I managed to find a solution for it. When looking over swaymsg -r -t get_outputs I realized that the monitor names have a specific format: VGA-1, HDMI-A-3…

I also realized that the last number in this format is the bemenu monitor index I need. The solution is a small python script, that retrieves the current focused monitor name and extracts the last number via regex:

#!/usr/bin/env python

import asyncio
from i3ipc.aio import Connection
import re


async def main():
    i3 = await Connection().connect()
    outputs = await i3.get_outputs()
    for output in outputs:
        if output.focused:
            return output.name

focus = asyncio.run(main())
match = re.search('.*-(\d)', focus)
print(match.group(1))

Hint: This unfortunately only works for a monitor setup with less than 10 monitors. If you have more (wtf?), just change the regex.

I am invoking the python script directly as bemenu parameter flag as: bemenu -m "$(script)".

With moving from rofi to bemenu, I also had to change my password and oath scripts. My oath script is new:

source "${HOME}/.local/share/scripts/bemenu"

input=$(ykman oath list | _bemenu -p "oath")
oath=$(ykman oath code -s "$input")
echo "$oath" | wl-copy --paste-once

It spawns up bemenu for selecting an oath resource that is saved on my Yubikey and copies it into my Wayland clipboard. Note that I use --paste-once as parameter for wl-copy. With this flag I am able to paste this OATH code only once. The clipboard will get cleaned up afterwards (very useful for secrets, passwords, etc). The downside of wl-copy --paste-once is that you can only paste to Wayland applications with it (this is annoying if you are using Chromium, like me).

My bemenu-gopass script uses the same mechanism:

source "${HOME}/.local/share/scripts/bemenu"

input=$(gopass list -f | _bemenu -p "gopass")
printf '%s' "$(gopass show -o "$input")" | wl-copy --paste-once

_bemenu is a small function with my custom bemenu command, because bemenu has no configuration file yet:

#!/bin/bash

_bemenu() {
  bemenu -i --hb "#151718" --tb "#151718" --nb "#151718" --hf "#9FCA56" --tf "#9FCA56" --fb "#151718" --fn "font pango:inconsolata 8" -m "$(swayfocused)" --no-exec "$@"
}

swayfocused is the name of my python script that I’ve mentioned above.