dwl support

[sed0]

Hi, I'd love to contribute a PR for this, but I'm not sure where to start. I have no experience with Rust or Wayland, so if anyone is willing to take this on or provide some guidance, I’d really appreciate it.
There's an IPC patch for dwl that might make it possible to add support for it. dwlmsg can display the active window title and appid using this IPC.
I was able to generate dwl_ipc files in Rust using wayland_scanner, but I’m struggling to use them properly to track the active window title and appid. I had trouble opening an output correctly but I think I'll be able to do the rest.
Could someone take a look at the dwl IPC protocol and explain how to use it in Rust?
Also, dwl doesn’t provide an ext-idle-notify-v1 protocol implementation, but there is wlr_idle_notify_v1. Can I use that instead, or is ext-idle-notify-v1 required?

[2e3s]

Hello!
Here's a list of supported environments for idle and active window watchers: https://github.com/2e3s/awatcher/blob/main/watchers/src/watchers.rs#L76

Also, dwl doesn’t provide an ext-idle-notify-v1 protocol implementation, but there is wlr_idle_notify_v1.

This suggests that the latter is an implementation of the former:

An idle notifier, implementing the ext-idle-notify-v1 protocol.

The implementation looks related to Hyprland at a glance, so looking at its code may make sense too. But generally, idle tracking is supposed work out of box if ext-idle-notify-v1 protocol is implemented.

There's an IPC patch for dwl that might make it possible to add support for it. dwlmsg can display the active window title and appid using this IPC.

The protocol looks a bit like wlr foreign toplevel protocol, which implementation can be taken as an example. That protocol is probably not supported by Wayland protocols crate, so something like this can be done. That's where I removed wayland-scanner for wayland-protocols crate, so something in reverse would need be done.

I was able to generate dwl_ipc files in Rust using wayland_scanner

Just to be clear, the actual version of wayland_scanner doesn't require anything to be generated. It works as a macros which takes a protocol XML and creates a data structure in compile time (or development for autocomplete). You can see how it worked in the aforementioned commit.

[sed0]

There's an IPC patch for dwl that might make it possible to add support for it. dwlmsg can display the active window title and appid using this IPC.

The protocol looks a bit like wlr foreign toplevel protocol, which implementation can be taken as an example. That protocol is probably not supported by Wayland protocols crate, so something like this can be done. That's where I removed wayland-scanner for wayland-protocols crate, so something in reverse would need be done.

I was able to generate dwl_ipc files in Rust using wayland_scanner

Just to be clear, the actual version of wayland_scanner doesn't require anything to be generated. It works as a macros which takes a protocol XML and creates a data structure in compile time (or development for autocomplete). You can see how it worked in the aforementioned commit.

Oh, got it! I was using it that way—I just assumed code generation was involved.

Thanks for the quick and detailed response! Hopefully, I’ll get back to you with a PR soon :)

[sed0]

Hi! I've actually had some success — it works perfectly fine with dwl on a single output/monitor, and I've been using it myself for a month already. I haven't been able to get it working with multiple monitors and I'm not sure how to approach that, it only reads windows from a single output and ignores the others. Here's the branch. I can submit a PR as it is, if that's fine for now.

This is the version of the IPC patch that works correctly. There's a bug in the latest version that causes crashes when the window title is null, and this version of the patch passes an empty string instead. It affects both awatcher and waybar, so I suspect the issue might be in Xwayland or the IPC itself.

[2e3s]

Hello, yes, create a pull request, please. I'm not sure when I can work on it but the pull request will make your code changes visible at least so it doesn't get lost, maybe someone can see and use it. I think I would add it a separate non-default feature, but not sure about multi-monitor setup.

haven't been able to get it working with multiple monitors

Maybe WlOutput is per monitor. TBH I didn't test multi-monitor for the existing Wayland implementation. I will check it if Virtualbox support multi-monitor.