Tweet
Hello all,
I'm an old, set in my ways linux user .Transition to Wayland has been something I've been watching, but very much from the sidelines. One of the main obstacles for me has been a lack of a stacking compositor that would match my workflow. I'm used to the flexibility of FVWM, which is, alas, very X11 focused. Gnome and KDE a bit too bulky for my taste and more lightweight alternatives seem to be either in development or focused on tiling layout.
Sway is mature and offers stacking layout in the form of floating windows, but being primarily a tiling compositor, it doesn't provide the control of the floating windows that I got used to. The two main features I found lacking are window placement (sway opens new floating windows in the center of the screen) and a taskbar.
On the bright side, Sway supports i3 ipc, allowing other software to inter-operate with it. This being open source, I decided to scratch my own itch and put it on github in hopes that it may help others.
The result is a piece of code, I called SFWBar - Sway Floating Window Bar. It implements smarter window placement, a taskbar and some widgets to display system info.
The placement method is equivalent of FVWMs TileCascadePlacement - first try to place the window without overlapping with any existing windows, if not possible, cascade windows from top-left to bottom-right,
Taskbar lists existing windows, can display an icon, title or both, and allows focusing, minimizing and restoring open windows (features similar to FvwmIconMan)
Widgets can basically grep any file (or output of other programs) and display them as text or progress bars. There are also a few miscellaneous widgets, such as buttons to launch programs etc.
I dropped the code at https://github.com/LBCrion/sfwbar
Hopefully this may be of use to people.
I'm an old, set in my ways linux user .Transition to Wayland has been something I've been watching, but very much from the sidelines. One of the main obstacles for me has been a lack of a stacking compositor that would match my workflow. I'm used to the flexibility of FVWM, which is, alas, very X11 focused. Gnome and KDE a bit too bulky for my taste and more lightweight alternatives seem to be either in development or focused on tiling layout.
Sway is mature and offers stacking layout in the form of floating windows, but being primarily a tiling compositor, it doesn't provide the control of the floating windows that I got used to. The two main features I found lacking are window placement (sway opens new floating windows in the center of the screen) and a taskbar.
On the bright side, Sway supports i3 ipc, allowing other software to inter-operate with it. This being open source, I decided to scratch my own itch and put it on github in hopes that it may help others.
The result is a piece of code, I called SFWBar - Sway Floating Window Bar. It implements smarter window placement, a taskbar and some widgets to display system info.
The placement method is equivalent of FVWMs TileCascadePlacement - first try to place the window without overlapping with any existing windows, if not possible, cascade windows from top-left to bottom-right,
Taskbar lists existing windows, can display an icon, title or both, and allows focusing, minimizing and restoring open windows (features similar to FvwmIconMan)
Widgets can basically grep any file (or output of other programs) and display them as text or progress bars. There are also a few miscellaneous widgets, such as buttons to launch programs etc.
I dropped the code at https://github.com/LBCrion/sfwbar
Hopefully this may be of use to people.