Just implemented something I've had in mind for a while: compositor-side blocking out of windows from screencasts! The compositor is the perfect place to do this since it can replace the window contents in the render tree, which will work fine with any kind of overlapping, transparency, etc. AND it will work with anything that records the screen through the portal, be it OBS or video meeting, or whatever.

There's actually an important edge case here: if you open the screenshot UI while recording the monitor, then the screenshot UI preview will show the window, and OBS, recording the screenshot UI preview, will hence also show the window. There are trade-offs here for how you want this to work; for now I put a big warning around the option, and added a stricter mode that blocks out the window from ANY screen capture (which means you can't screenshot it).

I think for the built-in screenshot UI this is solvable with one more layer of indirection (render the screenshot UI preview itself twice, once for screencasts, and once for the monitor). However, for third-party screenshot annotation tools, this will still be a problem.

Implemented this idea. It means rendering each monitor 3 times always for the screenshot but maybe it's fine? On this laptop 3 monitors × 3 renders takes 2 ms, and there's some unnecessary blocking I forgot to remove.

On the video, note how for me the screenshot UI has Secrets visible, but on the recording afterwards it's always blocked out.

I may be having too much fun recording a demo for the release notes

Amidst all the fires being put out, niri 0.1.4 which can block out windows from screencasts! https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/releases/tag/v0.1.4

And also gamma control, focus follows mouse, warp mouse to focus, wheel and touchpad scroll bindings, xdp-gnome 46 support.

Also, every single config option is now documented on the wiki! Which took like an entire week of work (even though I was reusing a lot of my previously written docs in the config). Check it out here: https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/wiki/Configuration:-Overview

#wayland #smithay #rust #niri

Today: horizontal column movement is now animated!

Took the whole yesterday and a bit of today, but I've got window closing animations working! These turned out to be tricky because they need storing a snapshot of the surface render tree to draw once the app is gone.

Some apps may start destroying their subsurfaces before the main surface, like alacritty with its sctk CSD, making it very easy to miss parts of the window in the snapshot, and therefore in the closing animation.

Also, windows closing to the left no longer shift the view!

#niri

Definitely one of the most complex animations yet: window resizing.

Just the crossfade effect itself took a while to get working with all the window geometries and buffer offsets, and then there's the whole multiple window orchestration with Wayland's asynchronous nature. (I don't do animation transactions yet, that'll be a whole other level of complexity on top.)

Happy with the result though, and it's cool that it seamlessly works with block-out-from screencast.

#niri

Window movement across columns is now animated too!

These weren't complex per se, but very *finicky*. Spent quite a bit of time chasing down all the offsets and coordinates to add and subtract to avoid jumps, but it seems to all work well now!

#niri

All the animations, plus VRR, today in niri 0.1.5: https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/releases/tag/v0.1.5

I also remade the demo video to showcase the animations and some of the newer features!

#niri #smithay #rust #wayland

We've reached 1000 commits 😅 with an a bit of an anticlimactic one though

Another tricky feature, rounded corners! Took several days, but I believe I've got a pretty complete implementation.

You (manually) set the window corner radius and whether to force-clip the window. You can set radius per-corner to match GTK 3 apps. It works correctly with subsurfaces, blocked-out windows, transparency, gradient borders, resize and other animations.

Optimization-wise, opaque regions and even overlay plane unredirection work where possible!

#niri #smithay

Also, we've now got a little #niri setup showcase thread https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/discussions/325

Added (stole from GNOME Shell as usual) a screen transition action, so now I can finally switch between dark and light in style

(of course, it works with blocked-out windows)

#niri

Okay, time for an actually useful feature: interactive mouse resizing (yes, finally). This was, as it goes, quite fiddly to implement, especially since niri has to negotiate with the window during the process.

I also added a double-resize-click (i.e. trigger a resize twice quickly) gesture to reset the window height or to toggle full width. Suggested by FreeFull on our Matrix and worked out very well! Really starting to feel quite nice with mouse.

(still no transactions yet)

#niri

nvim really taking its time processing all this 1000 Hz worth of resizing lol

Since I'm in a mouse gesture mood today: hooked up the horizontal touchpad swipe to Mod + middle mouse drag and omg it feels so good with the spring deceleration and all

(of course it also correctly avoids the touchpad scaling, so that when using the mouse gesture, the cursor location is always exactly anchored to the view position)

#niri

Now for something fun. I'm experimenting with the ability to set custom shaders for animations. Today I added custom shader support for window-close, which lets me make this cool falling down animation!

This is entirely optional of course, and there's no performance impact if you don't use it. Also, custom shaders, like the rest of the niri config, are live-reloaded, making it easy to play around with them.

#niri

Been fixing quite a bit of interactive resize jank and other small stuff since the last time, but also added custom shader support for window-open, thus completing it for all three main window animations (open, close, resize).

Now I didn't actually have any good idea of what I might want in a window open custom shader (I like the default), so I made a simple expanding circle animation to showcase it.

#niri