008.txt - gopherhole - My gopherhole source code.
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008.txt (3992B)
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1 [jay.scot]
2 [008]
3
4
5 --[ I moved over to wayland
6
7
8 I have been putting it off for ages, it's been on my to-do list for
9 months. Anytime I saw it pop-up I would just ignore it either due to
10 laziness, not interested or just general procrastinating. However, not
11 this weekend! Wayland will be the de facto and soon enough replace Xorg
12 am sure.
13
14 My setup is heavily terminal based with the usual tooling you see these
15 days. Suckless based tools such as dwm, dmenu and st as the main WM
16 tooling. Mutt for email, all kinds of feeds via Newsboat, MPV for
17 videos, browsing with Qutebrower and Amfora for Gemini. I was hoping
18 with such minimal GUI usage the switch over would be easy enough.
19 A quick look around and it looks like I would need to completely switch
20 dwm, dmenu and st over to a wayland equivalent.
21
22 I do have a few edge case applications I use but upon checking, they all
23 work under wayland. These were Qutebrowser (Browsing), Performance
24 Portfolio (Accounting) and Calibre (Ebooks), result!
25
26 First, the window manager! As it turns out there is a wayland port of
27 dwm called dwl, there seems to be a few trivial changes, but they are
28 basically like for like. On a sidenote, I had been tweaking dwm recently
29 and it really became a bit of a pain in the arse building, restart dwm
30 all the time. With this still at the back of my mind, anticipating that
31 I will be doing it again with dwl, I thought why not try out something
32 new. Enter Sway.
33
34 Sway is the wayland port of i3 with some common patches people used
35 rolled in. A look at the config file setup for Sway made it look very
36 straight forward to replicate my dwm keybinds and layout. Another
37 benefit being I could install the packages via the AUR instead of
38 building it myself, this felt like a plus after many many years of
39 compiling from source.
40
41 I kinda hate st, truth be told. You need to add in a few patches to the
42 build as out of the box it's very limiting. So on that I was happy to
43 find a replacement for st. Two options were on the table for me,
44 Alacritty and Foot. I ended up going with Foot, it seemed to be a lot
45 faster and lightweight compared to Alacritty, according to their own
46 benchmark results. I also wasn't sold on the idea of it being GPU
47 accelerated. Alacritty also clams to be faster than all the rest, but
48 they didn't seem to provide the actual benchmarks, just the tool they
49 used. Whereas Foot had a whole ton of information, benchmarks and
50 screenshots explaining why its fast as fuck.
51
52 Again the application was in the AUR and with a live reload config file
53 it was trivial to set up. Interestingly, the out of the box config would
54 have been fine, only thing I really changed were the colours and font.
55
56 dmenu, this one I spent most of my time researching and testing out
57 various alternatives. At first, I was just going to use rofi but soon
58 found out that it doesn't have native wayland support and uses Xwayland
59 instead. There is a port called wofi too, I tried both of them out.
60 I don't know, I just didn't like them, they seemed to flashy, the config
61 for them seemed tedious. I then tried out bemenu which is based on
62 dmenu, this was the one. Yet again I just needed to install the AUR
63 package, the config can be set via an environment variable called
64 BEMENU_OPTS. After playing about with it I just added this to my bashrc
65 profile and I was done. So simple, love it.
66
67
68 > export BEMENU_OPTS="-p '> ' --tb '#000000' --tf '#ffffff' --hf '#444444'"
69
70
71 So far I have had no crashes or any issues at all. One thing that I have
72 noticed is MPV playback seems way smoother and scrolling in Qutebrowser
73 is tear-free. So far so good, and I really don't feel like I am missing
74 anything switching over.
75
76 Another side, my installed packages has reduced massively, all
77 X packages have been removed as they are no longer needed. My dotfiles
78 directory looks a lot leaner without all the dwm, herbe, st and dmenu
79 builds. Trivial I know.
80
81 I guess now I just continue as is for a few more months and see what
82 I think then!
83
84 .EOF