Hikari - Wayland Compositor

Description

hikari is a stacking Wayland compositor with additional tiling capabilities, it is heavily inspired by the Calm Window manager (cwm(1)). Its core concepts are views, groups, sheets and the workspace.

The workspace is the set of views that are currently visible.

A sheet is a collection of views, each view can only be a member of a single sheet. Switching between sheets will replace the current content of the workspace with all the views that are a member of the selected sheet. hikari has 9 general purpose sheets that correspond to the numbers 1 to 9 and a special purpose sheet 0. Views that are a member of sheet 0 will always be visible but stacked below the views of the selected sheet.

Groups are a bit more fine grained than sheets. Like sheets, groups are a collection of views. Unlike sheets you can have a arbitrary number of groups and each group can have an arbitrary name. Views from one group can be spread among all available sheets. Some operations act on entire groups rather than individual views.

Please note that hikari is currently in alpha state and Wayland still requires some work on FreeBSD. This release is targeted towards people who want to help improving hikari by either providing feedback, patches and/or help improving Wayland on FreeBSD.

Setting up Wayland on FreeBSD

Wayland currently requires some care to work properly on FreeBSD. This section aims to document the recent state of how to enable Wayland on the FreeBSD STABLE branch and will change once support is being improved.

Start moused

Some systems might require moused for mice to work. Enable it with service moused enable

Setting up XDG_RUNTIME_DIR

This section describes how to use /tmp as your XDG_RUNTIME_DIR. Some Wayland clients (e.g. native Wayland firefox) require posix_fallocate to work in that directory. This is not supported by ZFS, therefore you should prevent the ZFS tmp dataset from mounting to /tmp and mount -t tmpfs tmpfs /tmp. To persist this setting edit your /etc/fstab appropriately to automatically mount tmpfs during boot.

Additionally set XDG_RUNTIME_DIR to /tmp in your environment.

Setting up PAM

Setting up PAM is needed to give hikari the ability to unlock the screen when using the screen locker. Copy the appropriate hikari-unlocker file from the pam.d folder to /usr/local/etc/pam.d (or /etc/pam.d on most Linux systems).

Setting up XKB

hikari currently gets its xkb settings settings the appropriate environment variables to something like the following.

XKB_DEFAULT_RULES "evdev"
XKB_DEFAULT_LAYOUT "de(nodeadkeys),de"

Building

hikari currently only works on FreeBSD and Linux. This will likely change in the future when more systems adopt Wayland.

Dependencies

• wlroots
• pango
• cairo
• libinput
• xkbcommon
• pixman
• libucl
• glib
• evdev-proto
• epoll-shim (FreeBSD)

Compiling and Installing

The build process will produce two binaries hikari and hikari-unlocker. The latter one is used to check credentials for unlocking the screen. Both need to be installed with root setuid in your PATH.

hikari can be configured via $HOME/.config/hikari/hikari.conf, an example can be found under share/exampes/hikari.conf.

Building on FreeBSD

Simply run make.

Building on Linux

On Linux bmake is required which needs to be run like so:

bmake WITH_POSIX_C_SOURCE=YES

Building with XWayland support

hikari offers optional XWayland support which is enabled via setting WITH_XWAYLAND.

make WITH_XWAYLAND=YES

Building with screencopy support

Screencopy support allows tools like grim to work with hikari, it also allows applications to copy the desktop content. This is disabled by default and can be added by setting WITH_SCREENCOPY.

make WITH_SCREENCOPY=YES

Building with gammacontrol support

Gamma control is needed for tools like redshift. This is disabled by default and can be enabled via setting WITH_GAMMACONTROL.

make WITH_GAMMACONTROL=YES

Building the manpage

Building the hikari manpage requires pandoc. To build the manpage just run make VERSION=1.0.0 doc, where VERSION is the version number that will be spliced into the manpage.

Community

The hikari community gears to be inclusive and welcoming to everyone, this is why we chose to adere to the Geekfeminism Code of Conduct.

If you care to be a part of our community, please join our Matrix chat at #hikari:acmelabs.space and/or subscribe to our mailing list by sending a mail to hikari+subscribe@acmelabs.space.

Contributing

Please make sure you use clang-format with the accompanying .clang-format configuration before submitting any patches.