Wayland Can Now Handle Virtual Workspaces

As the latest Wayland progress, patches have emerged so that the reference Weston compositor can handle virtual workspaces.

On Monday there were a set of five patches published by an independent developer, Jonas Ådahl, to the Wayland mailing list.

One of these patches to go against the shell for Wayland's Weston compositor allows for virtual workspaces. A workspace is basically a list of top-level surfaces visible at a time. Plus the patch introduces key-bindings for switching between these Weston "workspaces" in an easy manner. Below are the full details from the patch, which at the moment is only found in the mailing list and not the Weston Git repository.

A workspace is a list of top level surfaces visible at a time. New toplevel surfaces are added to the current workspace. Default keybindings (modifier - Up, modifier - Down, modifier - F1 up to F6) are used for navigating between workspaces. By default a single workspace is created.

Surfaces of inactive workspaces have their outputs NULL:ed so that frame callbacks gets queued instead of emitted. When workspace gets visible again surface's outputs are assigned.

The following patches then added support for animating workspaces changes and storing the focus state in workspaces.

Another Weston shell feature to come recently was a clock.