2023-10-22 Trying to use Sway as my window manager

I'm hoping to get a MNT Pocket Reform at some point and I heard that it comes with Sway as the default window manager. No problem, I can get into that. Years ago I was a fan of ratpoison and i3. Today, I'm trying to use sway. I think my biggest problem right now is that the pipe/backslash key works like a < and > key. How weird is that. Maybe some weird key binding that is coming back to haunt me.

In order to get started, I copied /etc/sway/config to ~/.config/sway/config and started making some changes.

Scrolling with the touch pad was weird. Somehow inverted! The answer was to have natural_scroll enabled for the touchpad input. This didn't always work. And the scroll wheel was different than the touchpad. So right now I'm using the following:

input * {
    dwt enabled
    tap enabled
    middle_emulation disabled
    xkb_layout us
    xkb_variant altgr-intl
    xkb_options compose:caps
}

input type:touchpad {
    natural_scroll enabled
}

This also makes Caps Lock the Compose Key again.

Getting the less key instead of the backslash key remained a problem. There are so many variants in /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/us. After a while I realised that I needed a variant with LSGT (less/greater) being mapped to backslash and bar, like this:

key  {	[ backslash,         bar	]	};

The options I had seemed to be: euro, ibm2381, intl, and so on. But also anything that contained dead keys was no good:

    key  { [dead_grave, dead_tilde,         grave,       asciitilde ] };

In these variants, I have to type every back-quote, single-quote, double-quote and circumflex twice. @bkhl@social.sdfeu.org pointed me to altgr-intl. Thanks!

Now I'm wondering about suspending the laptop. With Gnome, I'd hit the GUI key and type "suspend", Enter, done. But there is no "suspend" command. I ended up installing wlogout which gives me huge buttons to lock, logout, suspend, hibernate, shutdown and reboot. But, surprisingly, when it suspends, and it comes back, no password is required. That's weird!

I installed cryptsetup-suspend which adds something the old setup did not have: returning from a suspend now asks for the disk decryption password but still does not ask for the account password. Well, on a single user system like mine, one of the two is good enough, I guess. But still. And then the other time I tried it (by running wlogout and choosing "suspend") the system would go to sleep and I couldn't find a way to get it back. And when I reset it, it wiped my keyboard's config?? I don't quite understand but I hate all of it. I uninstalled it again.

#Administration #Sway #Window Manager

Time has passed and today I added keybindings for lowering and raising the volume.

bindsym XF86AudioLowerVolume exec amixer set Master '10%-'
bindsym XF86AudioRaiseVolume exec amixer set Master '10%+'

So proud of myself. 😁

As for playback from the command-line, right now I'm using mpv:

mpv "https://somafm.com/secretagent.pls"

Status bar

OK, time for fiddling with stuff. Every minute, the script called to produce the status bar.

bar {
    position top
    status_command while ~/.config/sway/status.fish; do sleep 60; done
    colors {
        statusline #ffffff
        background #323232
        inactive_workspace #32323200 #32323200 #5c5c5c
    }
}

The script prints something like this:

Bandu 65% 🟡 100% 🔊 fully-charged🔋 2023-10-31 15:40

This is the code. As you can see it calls awk, perl and tons of other stuff. Yikes!

#!/usr/bin/fish
# The Sway configuration file in ~/.config/sway/config calls this script.
# You should see changes to the status bar after saving this script.
# If not, do "killall swaybar" and $mod+Shift+c to reload the configuration.

set date (date +'%Y-%m-%d %R')

set battery (upower --show-info (upower --enumerate | grep 'BAT') | perl -e '
use utf8;
binmode(STDOUT,":utf8");
while (<>) {
  if (/state:\s*(.*)/) {
    print $1;
  } elsif (/percentage:\s*([0-9]+)/) {
    print $1 > 20 ? "🔋" : "🪫";
  }
}')
# "amixer -M" gets the mapped volume for evaluating the percentage
# which is more natural to the human ear according to "man amixer".
# The current volume percentage comes in brackets, e.g., "[36%]"
# followed by "[off]" or "[on]" depending on whether sound is muted or
# not. "tr -d []" removes brackets around the volume. I'm looking at
# "Front Left:" because of how amixer reports volumes on my laptop.
set audio_volume (amixer -M get Master |\
awk '/Front Left:/ {print $6=="[off]" ?\
$5" 🔇": \
$5=="[100%]" ? \
$5" 🔊": \
$5" 🔉"}' |\
tr -d [])

set wlan (nmcli --get-values name,device,type connection show --active \
              | grep wireless \
              | string split ':')

# $bar = join("", " ▁▂▃▄▅▆▇█", int(9*$1/$2), 1); \

set ssid $wlan[1]
set device $wlan[2]
set q (/sbin/iwconfig $device | perl -e '
use utf8;
binmode(STDOUT,":utf8");
while (<>) {
  if (/([0-9]+)\/([0-9]+)/) {
    print int(100*$1/$2) . "% " . substr("🔴🟠🟡🟢🟢", int(4*$1/$2), 1);
  }
}')
set lan (nmcli --get-values type connection show --active|awk '/ethernet/ { print "🖧" }')

echo $lan $ssid $q $audio_volume $battery $date

I'm learning quite a bit about controlling my system from the command line. I hadn't known about nmcli.

In order for the computer to lock when when idle, install swayidle (a separate Debian package). Then the following will have the expected effect:

exec swayidle -w \
         timeout 300 'swaylock -f -c 000000' \
         timeout 600 'swaymsg "output * dpms off"' resume 'swaymsg "output * dpms on"' \
         before-sleep 'swaylock -f -c 000000'

2023-12-23*. See Console for me getting rid of session managers and display managers. Now I boot into the console, log in, and my login shell starts Sway.

=> Console

2023-12-27*. I tried hibernation again and it worked. Ran wlogout and picked Hibernate. Everything went black. I waited for a bit, pressed the power button, and it came back up. First the initramfs asking me for disk decryption, then a black screen that I recognized as the password prompt. 😬

2023-12-29*. I recided to remove the xserver-common package, removing all the X11 stuff from the system. Well, a lot of it in any case. Also no xwayland.

With no more X11, I noticed that dmenu no longer worked and I replaced it with wofi. The following lets me use GUI+d to start desktop applications and GUI+Shift+d to start binaries on my $PATH.

set $desktop-menu wofi --show=drun
set $run-menu wofi --show=run --term=foot

# Start your launcher
bindsym $gui+d exec $desktop-menu
bindsym $gui+Shift+d exec $run-menu

I also had to rebuild Emacs using ./configure --with-pgtk to get a graphical Emacs without X11.

=> rebuild Emacs

This is going to be interesting.

2024-01-19*. Switched from wofi to fuzzel. Also installed bemoji.

bindsym $gui+s         exec fuzzel
bindsym $gui+c         exec $term --window-size-chars=80x25 orpie
bindsym $gui+d         exec evince
bindsym $gui+Period    exec /home/alex/.local/bin/bemoji -t
bindsym $gui+e         exec emacsclient --create-frame --alternate-editor=

The config file sets the terminal and gets rid of transparency:

terminal=foot

[colors]
background=fdf6e3ff
text=657b83ff
match=cb4b16ff
selection=eee8d5ff
selection-text=657b83ff
border=002b36ff

2023-12-31*. Interesting, there's also an x11-common package that I cannot remove. If I do that, libice6 needs to go, and with that, Libre Office has to go, for example… Wow.

Removing x11proto-dev is also impossible. So many other dev packages seem to depend on it, I suspect Emacs would no longer work.

Removing x11-utils removes Chromium, the backup browser! Now it really starts to hurt.

I guess X11 is here to stay.

2024-01-01*. Install sway-notification-center for the Firefox web notifications to show up correctly.

exec swaync
bindsym $gui+n         exec swaync-client -t -sw

Oh. And Gimp needs X11? "Cannot open display:" … that's bad.

I tried to use another file manager. Something leaner. Like midnight commander? I also looked at nnn. I think it uses xdg-open to open files.

Here's what's weird. The default application for PDF files is Gimp instead of Evince. I want to change that, but it appears to have no effect.

alex@melanobombus ~> xdg-mime query default application/pdf
gimp.desktop
alex@melanobombus ~> xdg-mime default Evince.desktop application/pdf
alex@melanobombus ~> cat .config/mimeapps.list

[Default Applications]
application/pdf=Evince.desktop
alex@melanobombus ~> xdg-mime query default application/pdf
gimp.desktop

In desperation, I uninstalled Gimp. The default was set to Libre Office Draw. I uninstalled that, too. Now the default was correct: org.gnome.Evince.desktop. What a headache. I'm sure it can be specified somewhere, but I don't know how.

OK, reinstalled Gimp, same problem. But now:

alex@melanobombus ~> xdg-mime default org.gnome.Evince.desktop application/pdf
alex@melanobombus ~> xdg-mime query default application/pdf
org.gnome.Evince.desktop

Oh, and installing xwayland, of course, so that I can run Gimp again.

2024-04-01*. In order to switch Firefox to dark mode, edit the GTK settings file and restart Firefox. Currently, that's the config file ~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini, even though a similar file exists for 4.0. The only setting that's important in this context:

[Settings]
gtk-application-prefer-dark-theme=1

Sadly, the above only changes my Firefox theme and doesn't seem to affect this site's CSS. The following has no effect:

@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) {
  …
}

At the console, the following still returns false, disappointingly:

window.matchMedia('(prefers-color-scheme: dark)').matches

It works with Chromium. My Firefox is 115.9.1esr (64-bit). This is unrelated to Sway: The situation is unchanged when I switch to Gnome. I feel like this has worked before?

=> this has worked before

2024-09-05*. Still using Sway. Also using Sway on the MNT Pocket Reform.

=> MNT Pocket Reform

2024-11-21*. Switching to the EURkey layout.

input * {
    dwt enabled
    tap enabled
    middle_emulation disabled
    xkb_layout eu
    # xkb_layout us
    # xkb_variant altgr-intl
    xkb_options compose:caps
}

The tricky parts:

CO₂ uses Caps Lock _ 2
the EN DASH takes Shift-Alt-7 Alt-Minus (Shift-Alt-7 is for the macron)
… is Shift-Alt-/
« » is Alt-[ and Alt-]
← → is Caps Lock < - and Caps Lock - >

Strangely, on Windows, more combos are possible but Caps Lock is no Compose Key.

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