Sway 1.0 beta.1 released with the addition of third-party panels, auto-locking, and more

Last week, Sway, the i3-compatible Wayland compositor, released its version 1.0-beta.1. The community mentions that the Sway 1.0-beta.1 is 100% compatible with the i3 X11 window manager.

Sway works well the existing i3 configuration and supports most of i3's features. The community also maintains the wlroots project to provide a modular basis for Sway and other Wayland compositors to build upon, and have also published standards for interoperable Wayland desktops.

This version includes many input and output features alongwith other features such as auto-locking, idle management, and more.

New features in Sway 1.0-beta.1

Output features

The Sway 1.0 beta.1 version includes a new output features where the users can get the names of the outputs for use in their config file by using swaymsg -t get_outputs.

Following are some examples of how outputs can be used:

To rotate display to 90 degrees, use:

output DP-1 transform 90

To enable Sway’s improved HiDPI support, use:

output DP-1 scale 2

To enable fractional scaling :

output DP-1 scale 1.5

Users can now run sway on multiple GPUs

In this version, sway picks up a primary GPU automatically. Users can also override this by specifying a list of card names at startup with WLR_DRM_DEVICES=card0:card1:...

Other features include support for daisy-chained DisplayPort configurations and improved Redshift support. Users can now drag windows between outputs with the mouse.

Input features

Users can get a list of their identifiers with swaymsg -t get_inputs. Users can now have multiple mice with multiple cursors, and can link keyboards, mice, drawing tablets, and touchscreens to each other arbitrarily. Users can have a dvorak keyboard for normal use and a second qwerty keyboard for a paired programming session. The coworker can also focus and type into separate windows from what a user is working on.

Addition of third-party panels, lockscreens, etc.

This version includes a new layer-shell protocol which enables the use of more third-party software on sway. One of the main features in sway 1.0 and wlroots is to break the boundaries between Wayland compositors and encourage standard inter-operable protocols.

The community has also added two new protocols for capturing user’s screen; screencopy and dmabuf-export. These new protocols are useful for screenshots and real-time screen capture, for example to live stream on Twitch.

DPMS, auto-locking, and idle management

The new swayidle tool adds support for DPMS, auto-locking, and idle management, which even works on other Wayland compositors. To configure it, start by running the daemon in the sway config file:

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

This code will lock user’s screen after 300 seconds of inactivity. After 600 seconds, it will turn off all of the outputs (and turn them back on when the user simply wiggles the mouse). This configuration also locks the screen before the system goes to sleep. However, none of this will happen if while watching a video on a supported media player (mpv, for example).