Qt 6.3 To Boast Improved Wayland Integration, Easily Allows Custom Shell Extensions

Qt 6.3 is expected for release in the coming weeks and with it comes enhanced Wayland support along with the ability for developers to easily create custom shell extensions.

While Qt already supports XdgShell and IviApplication (along with the old WlShell), with Qt 6.3 there is a public API to allow creating custom shell protocols for Wayland. Writing custom shell extensions is now considered a supported use-case beginning with Qt 6.3.

Qt 6.3 example from The Qt Company.

The custom shell extensions allow creating an arbitrary extension protocol and then writing the Qt Wayland compositor application and then a plug-in to be loaded by Qt applications. Permitting compositor support, this allows unmodified Qt 6.3 applications to make use of new shell extensions. In turn this opens up a lot of new possibilities for altering the behavior and appearance on Qt Wayland environments.

More details on this Wayland shell extension work for Qt 6.3 via the Qt blog.