4 ms·

Lack of global keybindings would keep me off wayland for a long time. At this point I am completely dependent on my keybinds in fluxbox for doing everything fro

by hyperion2010 12y ago

Lack of global keybindings would keep me off wayland for a long time. At this point I am completely dependent on my keybinds in fluxbox for doing everything from resizing windows to opening programs. If I can't specify real defaults that stupid programs cannot interfere with it will be useless.

catern 12y ago
No, Wayland only makes it difficult for individual applications to define global keybindings - so, for example, a global Ctrl-Space to play/pause your music player would need some extra plumbing to be implemented. Your WM owns (well, is, in Wayland) the display server, so it can define whatever keybindings it wants.
- tinco 12y ago
  It sounds like it's not Wayland making it difficult, but other systems making it way too easy. If I was a GUI application developer I would totally expect to have to interface with some WM API to register global key bindings. Being able to just listen to the keyboard even when the app is not in focus really does sound like a security problem waiting to happen.
- quotemstr 12y ago
  The problem with putting everything in the now-unified compositor-windowmanager-desktop thing is that it creates a huge barrier to implementing desktop customizations. Instead of being able to swap out just the window manager, or just the dock, or just the keybindings, you have to either fork the standard implementation (and be constrained by its architecture) or implement all the interfaces expected of applications.
  - wtallis 12y ago
    That's not accurate. A wayland compositor can implement plugin support and delegate stuff to external processes; this is how weston works. You can swap out one shell for another, and if you want you can implement a shell that itself delegates out the dock, window decoration, etc. each to different processes. But the defaults will and should be that arbitrary apps cannot in any way snoop on or interfere with the user's interaction with other apps, so obviously any app that wants to do so will have to get authorization and use some interfaces that aren't part of the normal protocol for presenting an app to the user. You're not "being constrained by [the] architecture" of the standard implementation in any way that's not completely justified.
    - quotemstr 12y ago
      You're suggesting that compositor- and shell-specific plugin interfaces can replace X11's desktop protocols? I understand that X11's security issues had to be fixed: I just wish that the new system had preserved some of X11's support for heterogeneous environments and not relied on the extensibility of specific compositor implementations.
      - wtallis 12y ago
        Wayland tries to be a simpler and smaller system than X11. For it to specify equivalents to ICCCM and EWMH would be way beyond its scope. But there's nothing preventing such equivalents from being standardized; it just won't be part of Wayland, since Wayland also wants to target use cases where such things would be inapplicable. If there ends up being a proliferation of wayland implementations that support pluggable components, I think we'll definitely see some quick standardization of the necessary interfaces. But at the moment people are still working on successfully using one desktop environment at a time, so good support for the mashups will have to wait.
  - catern 12y ago
    So, what you're ultimately complaining about is the lack of a standard API for creating window managers and the like - the X11 protocol includes this, the Wayland protocol does not. But this doesn't stop you from using the API provided by specific Wayland implementations to create a WM, and the ability to innovate on just this aspect without touching the rest of the protocol should make it a lot easier to create a good WM API. Yes, you have to choose the architecture/API of one of the existing implementations, or write your own. But this is much better than having no choice, and being forced to use the X11 protocol!

catern 12y ago

No, Wayland only makes it difficult for individual applications to define global keybindings - so, for example, a global Ctrl-Space to play/pause your music player would need some extra plumbing to be implemented. Your WM owns (well, is, in Wayland) the display server, so it can define whatever keybindings it wants.

tinco 12y ago
It sounds like it's not Wayland making it difficult, but other systems making it way too easy. If I was a GUI application developer I would totally expect to have to interface with some WM API to register global key bindings. Being able to just listen to the keyboard even when the app is not in focus really does sound like a security problem waiting to happen.
quotemstr 12y ago
The problem with putting everything in the now-unified compositor-windowmanager-desktop thing is that it creates a huge barrier to implementing desktop customizations. Instead of being able to swap out just the window manager, or just the dock, or just the keybindings, you have to either fork the standard implementation (and be constrained by its architecture) or implement all the interfaces expected of applications.
- wtallis 12y ago
  That's not accurate. A wayland compositor can implement plugin support and delegate stuff to external processes; this is how weston works. You can swap out one shell for another, and if you want you can implement a shell that itself delegates out the dock, window decoration, etc. each to different processes. But the defaults will and should be that arbitrary apps cannot in any way snoop on or interfere with the user's interaction with other apps, so obviously any app that wants to do so will have to get authorization and use some interfaces that aren't part of the normal protocol for presenting an app to the user. You're not "being constrained by [the] architecture" of the standard implementation in any way that's not completely justified.
  - quotemstr 12y ago
    You're suggesting that compositor- and shell-specific plugin interfaces can replace X11's desktop protocols? I understand that X11's security issues had to be fixed: I just wish that the new system had preserved some of X11's support for heterogeneous environments and not relied on the extensibility of specific compositor implementations.
    - wtallis 12y ago
      Wayland tries to be a simpler and smaller system than X11. For it to specify equivalents to ICCCM and EWMH would be way beyond its scope. But there's nothing preventing such equivalents from being standardized; it just won't be part of Wayland, since Wayland also wants to target use cases where such things would be inapplicable. If there ends up being a proliferation of wayland implementations that support pluggable components, I think we'll definitely see some quick standardization of the necessary interfaces. But at the moment people are still working on successfully using one desktop environment at a time, so good support for the mashups will have to wait.
- catern 12y ago
  So, what you're ultimately complaining about is the lack of a standard API for creating window managers and the like - the X11 protocol includes this, the Wayland protocol does not. But this doesn't stop you from using the API provided by specific Wayland implementations to create a WM, and the ability to innovate on just this aspect without touching the rest of the protocol should make it a lot easier to create a good WM API. Yes, you have to choose the architecture/API of one of the existing implementations, or write your own. But this is much better than having no choice, and being forced to use the X11 protocol!