komorebi VS smithay

I love seeing whenever this is (re)posted.

This article had such a huge impact on my life and led to me creating many pieces of software[1][2][3] that were hyper-specific to myself and my needs at the time, which also later found an audience in others who think and work in ways similar to me.

[1]: https://notado.app - a "content-first" internet bookmarking and highlighting service which has been my second brain since 2020 after growing frustrated with Instapaper, Pinboard and Readwise. Eventually I expanded this to allow for RSS feed publishing on specific topics in an attempt to solve the "firehose" problem when following other peoples' bookmarks/shares, and at the end of last year I added what is now my most used feature of image generation from highlights for sharing on image-first/text-hostile social media platforms.

[2]: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi - tiling window manager for Windows. There wasn't really anything fit for purpose on Windows when I started, and I was too spoiled by bspwm and yabai on Linux and macOS that I just had to write something before I could become a truly productive Windows user. I'm astonished that this now has 50k+ downloads.

[3]: https://kulli.sh - I use this to aggregate comments from HN/Reddit/Lemmy/Lobsters on an article I'm interests in in one place to read. This has helped me find some interesting niche communities on Reddit and Lemmy who share and discuss things I'm interested in that I otherwise wouldn't have found.

It's very heartening to see all of the stories here.

I've put the last few years of my life into working on komorebi, a tiling window manager for Windows[1], https://notado.app, a content-first social bookmarking service, and https://kulli.sh, a "bring your own links" comment aggregator which shows you comments from hn, reddit, lobsters, lemmy etc. on an article all in one place.

Unfortunately I was laid off after 5 years with the same company last month, and nobody seems to care about any of these projects when it comes to recruiting. There are people who use them that have reached out to me very kindly offering to make referrals, but the job market values LeetCode more than shipping real code these days.

[1]: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi

In the spirit of full disclosure, I wanted to share that throughout the changeset of this refactor which included 11 files changed, 597 insertions, and 133 deletions (full diff here), a single regression was found due to a logic error I introduced.

The two biggest tiling window manager projects for Windows are komorebi and GlazeWM. Komorebi is probably faster and more resource efficient since it is written in Rust, but I stick with Glaze for now since it has a cool status bar built in I like.

Not too many options for Windows OS, but this one looks decent: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi.

It's been a while since I last posted here. Since my last post, komorebi passed 3k stars on GitHub, became the most starred Windows twm of all time (surpassing bug.n!) and crossed 20k downloads.

This is pretty depressing. I'm pretty involved in the ricing side of the Windows ecosystem[1] and there is a lot of work going on in this space to allow users to get rid of the start bar entirely and replace it with something more functional. I would love for the day when there could just be a user friendly drop-in replacement.

[1]: I develop one of the two main Windows twms (https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi)

Regarding smithay being production ready, it's bug tracker mentioned it does not implement "idle-inhibit" , iirc that means you can't watch a movie without the lock screen being activated, i would argue most people would not consider that a production ready library.

https://github.com/Smithay/smithay may or may not be useful, depending on what exactly you want to do.

Understand Wayland concepts: Familiarize yourself with the basic concepts and principles of Wayland. This will help you gain a solid understanding of how the system works. You can refer to the official Wayland documentation (https://wayland.freedesktop.org/docs/html/) and the Wayland book (https://wayland-book.com/). Learn Rust: If you're not already proficient in Rust, take some time to learn the language. The Rust Book (https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/) is a great place to start. Study existing Wayland compositors: Since you mentioned Anvil and smallvil, you can study their source code to gain insights into how they're designed and implemented. Try to understand the structure and how different components interact with each other. Dive into Smithay: Smithay (https://github.com/Smithay/smithay) is a Rust library for building Wayland compositors. Familiarize yourself with the library and its components. You can start by studying the provided examples and reading the API documentation. Learn graphics programming: Since you're interested in graphics effects, you'll need to learn about graphics programming concepts, such as shaders, framebuffers, and texturing. Vulkan (https://www.vulkan.org/) is a popular graphics API that you can use with Rust. Check out the following resources to learn more about Vulkan and graphics programming in Rust: Vulkan Tutorial (https://vulkan-tutorial.com/) gfx-rs (https://github.com/gfx-rs/gfx), a Rust graphics library Vulkano (https://github.com/vulkano-rs/vulkano), a safe, pure-Rust wrapper around the Vulkan API Start small: Break down the compositor project into smaller, manageable tasks. Begin by implementing basic functionality, like setting up a window and drawing simple shapes. Gradually add more features, such as input handling and window management. Ask for help: Join the Wayland and Rust communities to ask questions and seek advice. You can find them on forums, mailing lists, and chat platforms like Discord or IRC. The Wayland mailing list (https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/wayland-devel) and the Rust programming subreddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/) are good places to start. Iterate and experiment: As you progress, keep experimenting with different graphics effects and shaders. Try to implement the features you're interested in, such as blur, window previews, and window switching.

Wayland compositor: https://github.com/Smithay/smithay

There is also smithay which is used by system76 for their new wayland compositor.

fwiw, wlroots-rs is no longer maintained. Consider using smithay instead.

Hello! I would like to hear some suggestion and opinions from Rust community about building Wayland ecosystem in Rust based around Smithay and their Client Toolkit. I'm working with Wayland Compositors for over 2 years now (private projects) and wanted to move ahead from C++ to build modern Desktop Ecosystem and it's components (truly unique, not copies of macOS or Windows styles) like notification daemon, customizable desktop shell or powerful wallpaper daemon for any compositor which implements layershell protocol. Current idea is to create wallpaper daemon which uses WGPU to render shaders, images or gifs with comfort of high perofrmance renderer (still learning wgpu and it's slow process). For UI components I would like to use truly amazing KayakUI create which uses JSX-style syntax for designing widgets. Desktop Shell should provide plugins (most likely applied through WASM) for integrating various creates to get e.g. weather info or compositor integration etc.