Hi,
after a discussion on #wayland, I want to write down some ideas about
compositor plugins for wayland at all.
At first, the wayland reference implementation should be as basic as
possible to make wayland also a choice for OpenBox users. On the other
hand, you want to have nice effects on your screen, wobbling windows
etc.
So the solution would be a plugin architecture that extends the
compositor for effects, app switchers and so on.
My idea is a shared library that is loaded by wayland and that has a
bunch of callbacks wayland can call.
There will be only one .so file loaded into wayland but that's no
reason to not implement plugin multiplexers and other interesting stuff.
So what we need to design is a plugin API that lets you do everything
you want. The compositor will have a list of procedure variables
containing the linked callbacks of the master plugin. Each function
call will be done if the pointer to the callback is not null. If the
plugin replaces something (for example drawing a surface), the
"native" implementation is not executed if there is a plugin function
for it.
Now a list of functions that will have to be in the plugin API. Please
read through it and add things I forgot:
- onDrawBackground (draws the back image)
- onAfterDrawBackground(for background animations, panels)
- onSurfaceUpdate (to manipulate the position matrix of the window,
called after you have matrix and matrix_inv)
- onSurfaceDraw (replaces the draw code of the display.. for
wobbling windows)
- onAfterDraw (to draw notifications)
- onSurfaceCreate
- onSurfaceDelete
- onKeyPress (to fish out global hot keys like Alt+Tab; maybe needs
events like up/down/press)
- Functions to manipulate the visibility of the surfaces
- Functions to request meta data from surfaces (fullscreen,
maximized, minimized, toolbox)
- Functions to set size and position
So the following things are possible with this plugin API:
- Having a clock and CPU load applets in background
- Multiple desktops
- desktop overview
- desktop cube
- whobbling windows
- notifications
- panels and window placement around the panel
- app switcher
- properly workigng fullscreen
What did I forget? What do you think about the idea or the concept of
implementing it?
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