Post · bonfire.cafe

@algernon@come-from.mad-scientist.club · 7 months ago

A'ight, gonna spin this out of my daily hellthread: I have a need for a small tool that can help me arrange my windows automatically, following a set of rules.

For X11, there's devilspie2 that can do this, but there's no generic solution for Wayland, and I am sticking to Wayland, because it has niri, which X11 does not.

So I will try to build something similar-ish! A little tool that listens on the Niri event stream, and does stuff according to pre-defined rules.

Unlike devilspie2, I do not plan to embed Lua, or any other language. I could, and that would make it almost trivial to implement, but I don't wanna. I want a configuration that is simple for me to write, even if that makes the tool a little bit more complicated, and somewhat more limited than embedding Lua.

(I might embed Lua later, but I don't see the immediate need).

Luddicus Mus

@algernon@come-from.mad-scientist.club · 7 months ago

Imaginary configuration:

match-window app-id="librewolf" title="Google Meet" {
on "window-opened-or-changed" {
move-window-to-workspace "social"
}
}

match-window app-id="librewolf" workspace="browser" {
on "window-opened" {
consume-or-expel-window-left
}
}

This would:

Move all LibreWolf windows titled "Google Meet" to the "social" workspace, whenever such a window is opened or changed (eg, when its title changes to Google Meet after opening)
Consume all newly opened LibreWolf windows on the "browser" workspace into the window on the left (their parent)

This pretty much covers everything I need from the tool right now.

Luddicus Mus

@algernon@come-from.mad-scientist.club · 7 months ago

Obligatory note and highlight: this is for Niri only. I have no intention of ever supporting another compositor within the tool, unless I switch away from Niri.

Federation Bot

@Federation_Bot · 7 months ago

Small progress was made on the tool: I'm experimenting with parsing the imagined configuration into something the tool can then work with.

It's going to be a little more complicated than originally anticipated, but I'll make do.

One obstacle I'll have to tackle later is good error messages. I want to emit similar miette diagnostics as the kdl crate itself, but with my interpretations on top of the KDL document.

So that for example:

match-window title="something" {
on "no-such-event" {
no-such-action
}
}

...would correctly report that "no-such-event" is not known, neither is "no-such-action", and would do the fancy diagnostics that point to the exact place.

Luddicus Mus

@algernon@come-from.mad-scientist.club · 7 months ago

Error: × Failed to load tmp/config.kdl
╰─▶ Failed to parse KDL document

Error:
× Found unrecognised event
╭─[5:8]
4 │ }
5 │ on "whatever" {
· ─────┬────
· ╰── unknown event
6 │ something
╰────

There we go!

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