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Wayfire 0.8.0 announcement

Hello everyone! It has been nearly three years since I last wrote to
this blog. Fortunately, that does not mean Wayfire's development has
stopped! Quite the opposite, in fact I am happy to announce the
release of Wayfire 0.8.0. There have been many changes and plugin API
breakages since the Wayfire 0.7.x series, so I will try to summarize
the important changes in the following paragraphs.

User-facing changes

First, let us take a look at the user-facing changes and new features
that were added in this release:

Workspace sets (Wayfire PR #1797)

Workspace sets are a new feature provided by the wsets plugin. A
workspace set is the grid of workspaces on one output. Up until now,
Wayfire always had one workspace set (albeit it wasn't called like
this) per output. With the recent changes, it is possible to have
multiple workspace sets on each output and switch between them. The
end result is very similar to how Sway's workspaces work: the plugin
numbers them from 1 to N, and at any given moment you can display any
of the workspace sets on any of your outputs (however, each workspace
set can be visible on at most one output at a time). Check the
YouTube video to get a better sense of what they provide (the
recording contains two Wayfire outputs side-by-side):

The purpose of workspace sets is to have a dedicated set of normal
workspaces for different activities the user does on their computer.
For example, I have one workspace set (containing a 2x2 workspace
grid) dedicated to Wayfire, where I have Wayfire's source code,
GitHub issues, wlroots, etc. There is another workspace set dedicated
to a project I am working on for university, and so on. Of course, a
similar effect could be achieved with a single bigger workspace grid,
but having a 5x5 workspace grid quickly becomes difficult to
navigate.

It should also be noted that workspace sets can be moved between
outputs, which is something generally impossible with normal
workspaces. I use this for example when switching between working on
my laptop and an external monitor - it is just a matter of showing
the workspace set on the new monitor.

IPC socket (Wayfire PR #1472, PR #1821)

A frequent request for Wayfire was the ability to control it via IPC
commands. With this release, Wayfire now provides a socket that
clients can use for this purpose. To use it, make sure to enable the
ipc plugin (it should be first in the list of plugins). The ipc
plugin itself does not implement any IPC commands, instead, it only
provides a generic framework for other plugins to extend. The
ipc-rules plugin provides a few basic window-management commands and
can be used to substitute the window-rules plugin with a custom
user-provided script, see the Python example for more information.

The plan for the future is to extend the ipc-rules plugin to support
more commands and to report more events to the IPC clients. In
addition, some other plugins provide their functionality as IPC
commands, for example wm-actions and grid. Lastly, there is a new
framework to allow all plugin bindings to be callable from an IPC
script - for example after this commit, the scale plugin can be
activated from the IPC socket.

If you want to use the IPC socket, but the currently provided
commands are not enough for your use-case (which is likely!), feel
free to reach out to discuss how to extend the existing IPC support.

Smaller changes

Some smaller, but important items from the git log:

  * Expo workspaces can now be navigated with the keyboard: PR #1156
  * Animations for the simple-tile plugin: PR #1071
  * Vswitch plugin has bindings for moving to a particular workspace
    and to last workspace: PR #1199, PR #1371
  * Multiple protocols which were previously provided by core have
    been moved to plugins: wayfire-shell (PR #1715),
    foreign-toplevel, gtk-shell (PR #1678). Most likely, you will
    want to enable those in your wayfire.ini.
  * Added support for the xdg-activation-v1 protocol: PR #1898

There were of course many, many other small fixes and added options
and PRs, which cannot be all presented here. See the full git
changelog for details :)

wf-shell

Thanks to multiple contributors, there have also been numerous
improvements to the default panel, wf-panel, part of wf-shell:

  * Huge thanks to a new contributor @NamorNiradnug, who implemented:
      + A notifications widget: PR #132
      + Command output widget for displaying the output of a shell
        command: PR #148
      + A tray widget: PR #153
  * Thanks to @soreau for implementing a logout interface: PR #100

Plugin API changes

The focus of the 0.8.0 release was to clear the technical debt which
has accumulated in core over the time. As a result, many APIs were
refactored and some were completely rewritten, resulting in many
breaking changes for plugins. On the upside, with most of the glaring
problems in the API fixed, plugin authors can expect less (at the
very least, much less severe) API changes in the future.

The following is a summary of the big items, many of which also
provide new or improved capabilities for plugins (and, unfortunately,
expose more of the complexity at times).

Scenegraph (Wayfire PR #1501)

Until now, Wayfire has had very simple algorithm for rendering and
input handling. Core had a list of outputs, and each output had a
list of layers and views in them. While the basic structure has
remained roughly the same, Wayfire 0.8.0 has a single structure
called the scenegraph, which organizes all of these in a structure
with a single interface. The scenegraph can also be used to repalce
custom renderers and input grabs used in previous versions of
Wayfire. See the wiki page on this topic for an introduction into the
technical aspects of it.

View Interface (Wayfire PR #1370, PR #1704)

Over time, Wayfire's central type - views, which represent
application windows - has accumulated too many methods, fields and
responsibilities. As a part of the refactoring effort, the input and
rendering aspects of this interface have been moved to the scenegraph
nodes associated with a given view. The view interface itself has
been split in two - 'generic' views, which represent any type of
window, including backgrounds, panels, etc. and a specialized
subclass toplevel views, which represent toplevel windows, which can
be moved, resized, maximized, etc. See the wiki for more details.

Transactions (Wayfire PR #1704)

Tiling plugins like simple-tile need a way to resize multiple
toplevels synchronously. In addition, certain changes in toplevel
states (for example fullscreening and resizing to the full output
size) belong logically together. In the Wayland protocol, these
concepts usually are represented by using commits which group
together related changes to an object. In Wayfire 0.8, we also have a
similar system on the server side - transactions. They can be used to
update multiple toplevels (or in general, transaction objects) and
their properties atomically.

Another possible application of transactions is providing
out-of-compositor decorations, like Emerald for Compiz: with
transactions, a plugin can synchronize the state of the decoration
and the main window. However, support for this has only barely
reached the proof-of-concept stage. For the interested in continuing
this development, a starting point can be found here.

Smaller changes

There were also multiple smaller fixes and updates to the API, a
non-exhaustive list of which is here:

  * Plugins now have one single instance, instead of one instance per
    output (use wf::per_output_plugin_t<> as a helper for achieving
    the old behavior): PR #1674
  * Keyboard focus is now tracked globally, instead of per-output: PR
    #1913
  * The signals API has been rewritten, so that it operates on types
    instead of strings for the signal names, reducing their overhead:
    PR #1495

Conclusion

Thank you for reading the blog to the end :) The latest Wayfire 0.8.0
release contains many breaking changes, but also some exciting new
features. Do not hesitate to open bug reports if you notice any
regressions if you are upgrading from the 0.7.x series. Last but not
least, many thanks to everyone who has contributed code or has tested
the git version of Wayfire!