Sway is a tiled Wayland compositor and a drop-in replacement for the i3 window manager for X11
After 11 months of development the release of the new version was announced composition manager sway 1.8, built on the Wayland protocol and fully compatible with the i3 window manager and i3bar panel.
For those who don't know about Sway, they should know that this is developed as a modular project built on top of the wlroots library, which contains all the basic primitives for organizing the work of the composite manager.
i3 support is provided at the command level, configuration and IPC files, allowing Sway to be used as a transparent replacement for i3, using Wayland instead of X11. Sway allows you to place windows on the screen not spatially, but logically. Windows are arranged in a grid that makes optimal use of screen space and allows you to quickly manipulate windows using just the keyboard.
To set up a complete user environment, related components are offered: swayidle (background process with KDE's dead protocol implementation), swaylock (screen saver), among others.
Main new features of Sway 1.8
In this new version that is presented of Sway 1.8 we can find that implemented a new command “bindgesture” to attach actions to touchpad gestures.
Another change that stands out is that the screen lock process (swaylock) changed to use Wayland protocol ext-session-lock-v1, which made it possible to increase the reliability and security of the session lock.
In addition to this, now from this new version of Sway 1.8 it is provided support for setting “disable while tracking” in the libinput library to control disabling the touchpad while using a voltage gauge bar (for example, TrackPoint on ThinkPad laptops).
We can also find that the xdg-activation-v1 protocol has been implemented, which is used to improve the reliability of the workspace definition when starting new client applications.
On the other hand, the library wlroots has improved implementation of the rendering system using the Vulkan graphics API.
To streamline the task launch scheduling process on the Linux platform, the ability to set CAP_SYS_NICE permissions has been implemented, as well as a new “disconnect output” command to remove virtual output devices has been added.
Of the other changes that stand out from this new version:
- Added support for high resolution mouse wheel scroll events.
- Support for working with the SUID root prompt has been discontinued.
- Deprecated "output dpms" command, replaced by the "output power" command.
- To work with regular expressions, pcre2 is now used instead of the pcre library.
Finally, if you are interested in knowing more about this new version, you can check the details at the following link.
How to get Sway?
For those interested in being able to test Sway on their systems, They should take into account that the main requirement to be able to use it is to have Wayland under the hood of your system.
It is important to mention that Sway will not work with proprietary graphics drivers, you will have to uninstall these and use the free drivers instead.
To install Sway on Ubuntu, as well as derivatives of it, they should add the following repository on their system.
For this let's open a terminal (they can use the shortcut keys Ctrl + Alt + T) and in it they will type the following command:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:samoilov-lex/sway
And we proceed to perform the installation with:
sudo apt install sway
While for those who prefer to compile, they must obtain the source code by typing the following:
git clone https://github.com/swaywm/sway.git
Run these commands:
meson build/ ninja -C build/ sudo ninja -C build/ install
On systems without logind, you need to suid the balancing binary:
sudo chmod a+s /usr/local/bin/sway
Sway will remove root permissions shortly after startup.
Finally, I must mention that at the time of writing the article the Sway package in the repository has not been updated to the new version, but it is a matter of hours before it is available.