hikari/README.md

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.

Local devfs.rules

NOTE: this should only be used on single user setups since it allows members of the video group to gain access to the input devices. This is a temporary solution until FreeBSD offers ways to handle this in a better way.

Add the following to /etc/devfs.rules

[localrules=10]
add path 'input/*' mode 0660 group video

Add devfs_system_ruleset="localrules" to /etc/rc.conf.

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 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. This will likely change in the future.

Dependencies

• wlroots
• pango
• cairo
• libinput
• xkbcommon
• pixman
• libucl
• glib
• epoll-shim

Compiling and Installing

To build all executables required to run hikari simply run make, this 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 doc/example_hikari.conf.

TODO before 1.0

• Keybindings currently only work with libinput keycodes.
• Popups are not positioned correctly on multi monitor setups.
• Configuration processing is still buggy and can lead to issues when errors are encountered.
• Manpage is still missing.

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 .clag-format configuration before submitting any patches.