Alt-Tab Support, Exposay For Wayland's Weston

[Kostas]

Finally alt-tab on the display server level... it may sound weird but lack of it was one of my big problems with X11/Linux way back when I switched from Windows.

As per the above post, I seriously doubt KDE or GNOME will end up using this.

[TheBlackCat]

Finally alt-tab on the display server level... it may sound weird but lack of it was one of my big problems with X11/Linux way back when I switched from Windows.

Weston isn't a display server, it is a compositor. Other Linux compositors have had this feature as long as they have existed.

[cip91]

(on X11) Most fullscreen apps completely ignore it.

Exactly. Does these patches mean that finally Alt-tab will always work?

[valeriodean]

I figured that was the case. You don't tend to make brutal spelling mistakes like that, in fact, typos are surprisingly rare on this website.


Anyway, its nice seeing weston piecing together so nicely. I'm just wondering though - how much work is left for just wayland? I feel like wayland by itself hasn't got much attention lately. Unless there are some major distros out there that intend to use weston, I really don't see why so much attention is given to it when several DEs intend to support wayland without (to my knowledge) the use of weston.

Weston is a testbed for all the proposals other than new features.
Reading in the mailing list of mutter (ie. the code from the wip branch) as well from the other project's mailing list, you can see many features just copied from Weston or strongly inspirated by the Weston's code.
The subsurfaces code (yesterday merged in the core Wayland protocol) have been tested in Weston for months.
Same story for others features.
It is not a casuality that, for the Gnome switch to Wayland, it was been necessary to have a running compositor first, because to develop or to adapt the features to Wayland you need a running compositor under your code, so mutter was one of the first component to see patches (from Giovanni, in particular).
For the same reason the wayland's devs have builded a wayland compositor for testing staff, so they have refined and improved Weston step by step through the progress done on the Wayland's protocol design.
It wasn't a side-like project that taken away time and resources from the Wayland development, it was crucial to the Wayland development.
That said, there are many little project (Tizen? Raspberry?) that don't want to build from scratch a wayland compositor, but prefer to use Weston (because it wroks pretty good indeed).

[valeriodean]

Exactly. Does these patches mean that finally Alt-tab will always work?

Honestly I didn't check the code, but theoretically, because all input are sent to the client through the compositor, the compositor is the first that sees your ALT+Tab combination, and because the compositor is the compositor, it can do what it want and the client can't ignore it no matter what.

[valeriodean]

Honestly I didn't check the code, but theoretically, because all input are sent to the client through the compositor, the compositor is the first that sees your ALT+Tab combination, and because the compositor is the compositor, it can do what it want and the client can't ignore it no matter what.

Sorry, I can't edit my post (no idea why) so I add here the correction:
because the compositor is *also* the display server, it can do what it wants.
(Wayland's architecture)

[rudregues]

I feel like an idiot. I've been a Linux user for about a dozen years, and pretty good at the command line so keyboard shortcuts should be second nature to me. But thanks to this brief thread I just learned that Alt-Tab does window-switching.

Like that old saying goes, "it was hidden in plain sight."

Are you serious? It was the first shortcut I've learned. Windows use this shortcut too.

[cip91]

Sorry, I can't edit my post (no idea why) so I add here the correction:
because the compositor is *also* the display server, it can do what it wants.
(Wayland's architecture)

Thanks for the explaination and for the link, guess it's time to read!

[Delgarde]

As per the above post, I seriously doubt KDE or GNOME will end up using this.

Yes, that's correct. There are two approaches to developing a Wayland desktop - either implementing it as an extension to the Weston compositor, or by writing your own compositor. Both Gnome and KDE are taking the latter approach, so code changes to Weston are irrelevant to them.