💾 Archived View for jay.scot › rants › 008.gmi captured on 2022-03-01 at 15:04:45. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2021-11-30)
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I have been putting it off for ages, it's been on my to-do list for months. Anytime I saw it pop-up I would just ignore it either due to laziness, not interested or just general procrastinating. However, not this weekend! Wayland will be the de facto and soon enough replace Xorg am sure.
My setup is heavily terminal based with the usual tooling you see these days. Suckless based tools such as dwm, dmenu and st as the main WM tooling. Mutt for email, all kinds of feeds via Newsboat, MPV for videos, browsing with Qutebrower and Amfora for Gemini. I was hoping with such minimal GUI usage the switch over would be easy enough. A quick look around and it looks like I would need to completely switch these applications over to a wayland equivalent.
I do have a few edge case applications I use but upon checking, they all work under wayland. These were Qutebrowser (Browsing), Performance Portfolio (Accounting) and Calibre (Ebooks), result!
First, the window manager! As it turns out there is a wayland port of dwm called dwl, there seems to be a few trivial changes, but they are basically like for like. On a sidenote, I had been tweaking dwm recently and it really became a bit of a pain in the arse building, restart dwm all the time. With this still at the back of my mind, anticipating that I will be doing it again with dwl, I thought why not try out something new. Enter Sway.
Sway is the wayland port of i3 with some common patches people used rolled in. A look at the config file setup for Sway made it look very straight forward to replicate my dwm keybinds and layout. Another benefit being I could install the packages via the AUR instead of building it myself, this felt like a plus after many many years of compiling from source.
I kinda hate st, truth be told. You need to add in a few patches to the build as out of the box it's very limiting. So on that I was happy to find a replacement for st. Two options were on the table for me, Alacritty and Foot. I ended up going with Foot, it seemed to be a lot faster and lightweight compared to Alacritty, according to their own benchmark results. I also wasn't sold on the idea of it being GPU accelerated. Alacritty also clams to be faster than all the rest, but they didn't seem to provide the actual benchmarks, just the tool they used. Whereas Foot had a whole ton of information, benchmarks and screenshots explaining why its fast as fuck.
Again the application was in the AUR and with a live reload config file it was trivial to set up. Interestingly, the out of the box config would have been fine, only thing I really changed were the colours and font.
This one I spent most of my time researching and testing out various alternatives. At first, I was just going to use rofi but soon found out that it doesn't have native wayland support and uses Xwayland instead. There is a port called wofi too, I tried both of them out. I don't know, I just didn't like them, they seemed to flashy, the config for them seemed tedious. I then tried out bemenu which is based on dmenu, this was the one. Yet again I just needed to install the AUR package, the config can be set via an environment variable called BEMENU_OPTS. After playing about with it I just added this to my bashrc profile and I was done. So simple, love it.
export BEMENU_OPTS="-p '> ' --tb '#000000' --tf '#ffffff' --hf '#444444'"
So far I have had no crashes or any issues at all. One thing that I have noticed is MPV playback seems way smoother and scrolling in Qutebrowser is tear-free. So far so good, and I really don't feel like I am missing anything switching over.
Another side, my installed packages has reduced massively, all X packages have been removed as they are no longer needed. My dotfiles directory looks a lot leaner without all the dwm, herbe, st and dmenu builds. Trivial I know.
I guess now I just continue as is for a few more months and see what I think then!