LWN: Comments on "The Wayland Protocol"

The Wayland Protocol

dfsmith — Thu, 21 May 2020 20:18:27 +0000

Or "as the design choices of Wayland become intuitive"?

The Wayland Protocol

smitty_one_each — Fri, 08 May 2020 03:28:49 +0000

But the irony of doing unicode art to depict a graphical desktop in Markdown cannot be overlooked.

The Wayland Protocol

mpr22 — Fri, 08 May 2020 02:24:24 +0000

Unicode art is monochrome pixel art, thanks to the (Extended) Braille codepoints.

(Bonus: unlike ASCII art, as long as it doesn't turn into tofu it survives display in arbitrary proportional fonts.)

The Wayland Protocol

smitty_one_each — Fri, 08 May 2020 01:24:14 +0000

Can one do ASCII art in Markdown?

Given that it's all UTF-8, can we call it ASCII art?

XKB ?

mathstuf — Thu, 07 May 2020 02:34:42 +0000

I think that for such a common key like caps lock rewiring, I think I'll assume that it is safer than trying to guess what madness is going on with Fn-modifier scancodes and trying to play around with them. I personally haven't had a need for more exotic remappings, but will keep that in mind when helping out others. Thanks.

XKB ?

whot — Thu, 07 May 2020 00:05:16 +0000

changing codes through udev is the software equivalent of changing the physical wiring of the key. it does give you the result you want but its not necessarily what the keyboard manufacturer will recommend as a generically applicable solution.

XKB ?

mathstuf — Wed, 06 May 2020 23:34:25 +0000

I think I had seen that on one of my searches for the current state of the Wayland world. The lack of activity is disappointing, but this is one of those things I'd need to hop in myself to help out with. Maybe I'll find time some day :/ .

XKB ?

mathstuf — Wed, 06 May 2020 23:28:58 +0000

Well, found someone who definitely knows more than me at least :) . Thanks for the info.

> Actual user-specific remapping should be done in the keyboard layout

Hmm. I have my caps lock remapped to backspace in udev so that it works on the TTY too. I guess you recommend that being done in xkb instead?

XKB ?

whot — Wed, 06 May 2020 22:26:04 +0000

libinput does very little with key events, it merely passes them on as-is. Key events are only looked at for meta-functionality like disable-while-typing. There's nothing in libinput to change a key code, it sits below the concept of keyboard layouts.

udev uses the 60-keyboard.hwdb file to remap some keys into the *expected* ones. This too sits below the concept of layouts, it merely exists so that the "volume down" key on your laptop actually sends the volume down evdev code rather than the DeathToAllKittens code which the vendor so graciously programmed the firmware for.

Actual user-specific remapping should be done in the keyboard layout, i.e. with XKB because xmodmap isn't a thing in Wayland.

XKB ?

nybble41 — Wed, 06 May 2020 20:53:00 +0000

Have you tried <https://github.com/waymonad/waymonad>? It's a work in progress, but it's the closest Wayland equivalent to XMonad that I am aware of.

XKB ?

floppus — Wed, 06 May 2020 18:52:51 +0000

There was an article here recently about changes to XKB that should hopefully make it possible to customize by mere mortals:
https://lwn.net/Articles/811723/

XKB ?

mathstuf — Wed, 06 May 2020 16:51:35 +0000

libinput and udev should be able to cover your cases (I believe). Probably warrants more information from more knowledgeable folk since I'm stuck on X since XMonad is basically a hard drug that leaving will end up giving me withdrawal symptoms. All the existing compositors I've seen are i3-like which is…insufficient for me. But I have tried to port everything else in my setup over to the "newer" techs as much as possible given that anchor.

XKB ?

ballombe — Wed, 06 May 2020 11:18:27 +0000

So Wayland is still using XKB ? Does it have a xmodmap replacement?

The Wayland Protocol

oldtomas — Wed, 06 May 2020 09:21:54 +0000

Hm. "...as the intuitive design choices of Wayland become clear" or rather "...as the design choices of Wayland become intuitively clear"?

woops

CChittleborough — Wed, 06 May 2020 04:43:13 +0000

Correction: <code>$ cd wayland-book</code>.

compilation

CChittleborough — Wed, 06 May 2020 04:40:56 +0000

Here’s what I used.

$ git clone https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/wayland-book
$ cargo install mdbook
$ cd ../wayland-book
$ mdbook build
$ xdg-open book/index.html

The Wayland Protocol

cesarb — Tue, 05 May 2020 22:28:47 +0000

For some reason, the Wayland protocol as explained on this reminded me of io_uring's ring buffers.

compilation

rillian — Tue, 05 May 2020 19:39:04 +0000

If anyone else is confused after checking out the source, one can build the book with:

$ cargo install mdbook
$ mdbook
$ xdg-open book/index.html

The Wayland Protocol

vivo — Tue, 05 May 2020 16:11:25 +0000

Interesting that a book about a graphical interface protocol has no image whatsoever :=)

The Wayland Protocol

dankamongmen — Tue, 05 May 2020 15:42:38 +0000

Just the first few pages have already convinced me that this is going to be a great payback on invested time. Thanks for posting it, LWN!