XWayland Lands Support For xdg-system-bell

Written by Michael Larabel in Wayland on 2 December 2024 at 06:15 AM EST. 14 Comments
WAYLAND
Olivier Fourdan has merged support for using the xdg-system-bell protocol by XWayland for dealing with "system bell" functionality for Wayland compositors supporting this newer protocol for ringing the system bell or otherwise implementing a visual indicator that a system bell type event may have been triggered.

XWayland has already supported system bell type functionality where the Wayland compositor implements XkbBellNotifyMask support. But now XWayland supports xdg-system-bell as that newer Wayland protocol for handling system bell functionality. Rather than making it necessarily ring an audible system bell on systems supporting it, the xdg-system-bell protocol could be implemented by Wayland compositors as a visual cue or other indicator that such an event was triggered.

The xdg-system-bell protocol was rolled out in October with Wayland Protocols 1.38. It's quite open in the protocol for how compositors can implement the functionality:
"This requests rings the system bell on behalf of a client. How ringing the bell is implemented is up to the compositor. It may be an audible sound, a visual feedback of some kind, or any other thing including nothing.

The passed surface should correspond to a toplevel like surface role, or be null, meaning the client doesn't have a particular toplevel it wants to associate the bell ringing with. See the xdg-shell protocol extension for a toplevel like surface role."

In any event with this merge it's now the newest feature of XWayland.
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