ewx: Emacs can do wayland now :)

% git clone http://perma-curious.eu/ewx.git

This is a demo & not ready for serious usage!

TOC

ews.c

Wayland Server in C

ewc.el

Wayland Client in Elisp

ewp.xml

Wayland Protocol

ewl.el

Wayland layout (named buffer in talk)

HOW?

Most wayland compositors have the window manager inside the core. This uses a minimal wayland server that talks to Emacs instead. Wayland is all about talking and you can just extend it with your own protocols. This is what I did.

Check it out @ ewp.xml

I got the idea from https://github.com/riverwm/river

YEAH BUT WHY?

1. Show anything that can do a wayland surface inside Emacs
2. Get input & output handling into Emacs

= NEXT level EXWM

QUESTIONS & FEEDBACK

I would appreciate your opinion & design feedback:

1. Think of a more poetic name?
   I like the description of the different parts: ew*\ But * is tricky and there is already eww.
2. How to surface input handling to the user?
   What would be a nice Elisp interface?\ Think about EXWM input filtering and simulation.
3. How to embed wayland widgets?
   I have not researched this yet. But I think there needs to be some support in Emacs core. Xwidgets are there at least.\ Maybe there is a more coherent story for embedding in emacs?
   • (CURRENT STATE: nested rectangles
     windows inside a frame | windows show a buffer |\ a buffer is mostly unicode BUT also pictures & widgets)\
4. Wayland is done by C people. Can we do an even more lispy wayland client?

Patches, ideas, whatever: [email protected]

If your message should be part of the public discussion please tell me.

HOW TO DEMO?

If you run guix then good for you and you can just:
% guix shell –manifest=manifest.scm – make check \ This runs ewx nested under your current window manager.

You do not use guix yet? Just install the dependencies listed in manifest.scm manually. Afterwards run:
% make check

REFERENCES

• Trailblazers
  • https://github.com/ch11ng/exwm
  • https://github.com/ch11ng/xelb
• Wayland
  • https://wayland-book.com
  • https://wayland.freedesktop.org
  • https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots
  • https://github.com/Hjdskes/cage
  • https://github.com/riverwm/river
• Also
  • https://github.com/stumpwm/mahogany
  • https://git.sr.ht/~shunter/wayflan
  • https://github.com/swaywm/sway

NEXT | WHERE COULD THIS LEAD?

Emacs display engine does the composition (How? Does STEPS help?). It provides a wayland server for other applications to hook into.

-> WinWin

• Emacs stays independent, becomes more powerfull
• and it can be expected that many things learn speaking wayland eventually. So emacs can incorporate (/shell) them.
• Actual major window manager / wayland helper code could stay a plugin based on wlroots?