Is light-weight window manager possible with Wayland?

[Pekka Paalanen]

On Fri, 17 May 2013 12:08:23 +0700
Michael Pozhidaev <msp at altlinux.ru> wrote:

> Hello!
> 
> Maybe the things I am asking now are well-known but although I have tried to
> read various materials about Wayland and Weston some details remain
> unclear for me. I would like to clarify them and would be very grateful
> for any help!
> 
> Is creation of light-weight window manager possible for Wayland? I mean
> window manager that does windows size and position manipulation in the
> same manner as for example DWM does.
> 
> I think it is very convenient when it is possible to write your own WM
> with less than 2000 lines of code and implement any custom behaviour you
> want.I am not interesting in any visual effects and any other features
> usually discussed as Wayland or Weston advantages. 
> 
> Is "shell" term used in Weston is a thing I need? Can I implement tiling
> WM behaviour with it? I have tried a search for "tiling window manager for Wayland"
> and found ADWC:
> 
> http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA5MTA
> 
> This page says that "ADWC supports multiple monitors and is an experimental fork of the Weston reference compositor for
> Wayland." I think any clone of Weston itself cannot be a real
> light-weight window manager. 
> 
> Am I wrong in my conclusions with "shell" for Weston? Thank you for any help! :))
> 

Hi,

what you likely want to do, is to fork Weston's desktop shell plugin,
that is src/shell.c. Ideally, shell.c would be split into two with an
interface in between, so that one side does the desktop protocol,
and the other side does window management, so you would only need to
replace the window management to make a new window manager. But that
does not exist right now, and we'd need several different "window
managers" to see what that interface should be or if it is even
feasible.

So, depends on what you mean by "light-weight". See also:
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/wayland/weston/tree/notes.txt

If you are looking to make a new program, that simply acts as the
window manager for some existing Wayland server, just like you do with
X11, that probably will not happen. At least Wayland and Weston will not
provide protocol for that. Making the window manager a server plugin on
the other hand is the way to go. The window manager is best to have in
the same process as the whole server.

Maybe the Qt compositor frameworks could be another path besides Weston?


Thanks,
pq