Milad Alizadeh
2cd076699d
"title · app" centred under each thumbnail, in the same font the rofi theme used (Berkeley Mono at pango's "small"), with the selected tile's label inverted onto the yellow the way rofi's element background did. Long titles are ellipsised to the cell width. Text comes from cosmic-text, which brings real shaping. The catch is cost: building a font system and rasterising the first glyphs takes ~55ms, nearly doubling a 65ms startup. But the capture phase is ~55ms of sitting blocked while the compositor copies pixels, so labels are shaped on a worker thread started before the captures and joined after them. The measured labels phase is now 0.0ms — it costs nothing in wall clock. Two thirds of that font cost was FontSystem::new() scanning all 1793 system faces, which even new_with_fonts() does. So the database is built by hand: the user's own font directories first, since they are small, and the full system scan only when the family isn't found there. An unknown family still resolves, because that fallback is exactly the system scan (verified: --font "No Such Font" renders in Noto). --hide-labels restores the icon-only grid, and --font/--font-size make the family and size settable. Adds a test that a label actually puts pixels on the surface, one for ellipsising, and one pinning the label row into the element geometry.
107 lines
4.2 KiB
Markdown
107 lines
4.2 KiB
Markdown
# wlgrid
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A window switcher for wlroots compositors: a thumbnail grid overlay that looks
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like a rofi theme, and focuses the window you pick.
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It replaces a `wlthumbs | rofi` pipeline. The difference is that no thumbnails
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exist: each window is captured straight into a `wl_shm` buffer that is handed to
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its own `wl_subsurface`, and `wp_viewporter` tells the compositor which rectangle
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to scale it into. There is no image encoding, no scaler, and no full-resolution
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bitmap in this process — which is also why it holds ~9 MB of RSS and appears in
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about 60 ms.
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```
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sway-tree 0.6ms window list + con_ids over sway IPC
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toplevels 0.2ms ext-foreign-toplevel-list handles
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constraints 1.5ms every capture session's buffer size, in one roundtrip
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capture 52.5ms 8 windows, all frames in flight at once
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labels 0.0ms shaped on a worker thread while the captures ran
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mapped 4.9ms layer surface + subsurfaces on screen
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```
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The capture phase is the compositor reading full-resolution window pixels out of
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the GPU. It is bandwidth-bound (~1.1 GB/s here) and unaffected by how large the
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thumbnails are — which also makes it a free window to do other work in. Loading
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a font and rasterising its first glyphs costs ~20ms, so labels are shaped on a
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worker thread started before the captures and joined after them, and cost
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nothing in wall clock.
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## Status
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Working, and usable as a switcher today: a labelled static grid with keyboard
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navigation. Filtering and live previews are next — see the roadmap.
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## Usage
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```
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wlgrid [--print] [--verbose] [--hide-labels] [--font FAMILY] [--font-size PX]
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[--timeout SECS]
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```
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- `--print` writes the selected sway `con_id` to stdout instead of focusing it
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- `--verbose` prints phase timings and how many windows were captured
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- `--hide-labels` draws an icon-only grid
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- `--font FAMILY` label font family (default `Berkeley Mono`)
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- `--font-size PX` label size in logical px
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- `--timeout SECS` exits after a deadline (an escape hatch: the overlay takes an
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exclusive keyboard grab)
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Bind it in sway:
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```
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bindsym $mod+Tab exec wlgrid
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```
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| key | |
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|---|---|
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| `→` `←` / `Tab` `Shift+Tab` | next / previous window |
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| `↑` `↓` | move a row |
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| `Home` `End` | first / last |
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| `Enter` | focus the selection |
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| `Escape` / `q` | cancel, leaving focus alone |
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Navigation reads raw evdev keycodes, so it is layout-independent — but it also
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means virtual-keyboard clients such as `wtype` (which invent their own keymap)
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cannot drive it. That goes away with xkb support, which filtering needs anyway.
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## Look
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Colours, font metrics and grid geometry come from the rofi theme this replaces
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(gruvbox dark, a yellow selection filling the element padding, `ceil(sqrt(n))`
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columns capped at 4, 16:9 tiles, `title · app` centred underneath) and live in
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`src/theme.rs`. They will move to a config file so they can't drift from the
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`.rasi`.
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The font is looked up by family name. Your own font directories are scanned
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first because they are small; the full system scan (~37ms) happens only if the
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family isn't found there, and an unknown family then falls back to whatever
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cosmic-text picks rather than failing. Long titles are ellipsised to the cell.
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## Requirements
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A wlroots compositor advertising `ext-image-copy-capture-v1`,
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`ext-image-capture-source-v1` (with the foreign-toplevel source manager),
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`ext-foreign-toplevel-list-v1`, `wlr-layer-shell-unstable-v1` and
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`wp_viewporter` — sway 1.11+, and in principle Hyprland, labwc and jay, though
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only sway is tested. sway is also the source of truth for the window list and
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for focusing, over its IPC socket.
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Known upstream issue: holding per-toplevel capture sessions open makes windows
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blurry on **fractionally scaled** outputs
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([sway#9113](https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/9113)). Integer scales are
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unaffected. It matters more once previews are live.
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## Roadmap
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- **M3** type-to-filter with fzf-quality fuzzy matching (and xkb keyboard input)
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- **M4** live previews: keep the capture sessions open and re-capture on a rate
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limit, `--live all|current|none`
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- **M5** dmabuf capture, so the pixels never leave the GPU at all
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## Building
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```
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cargo build --release
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cargo test # grid geometry, ellipsising, glyph output
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```
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