funny how while working on alt-tab i discovered that mouse scrolling on top of the DMS bar switches workspaces, which completely replaced any need i had for alt-tab, so i ended up never using it
this DMS bar scrolling feature also removed one of my main usecases for the overview
and then the new horizontal window drag gesture removed my other main usecase for the overview, so now i'm opening the overview quite rarely too
(both have their uses; just curious to watch my own habits shift)
I've had one of those sessions today where I worked with a ton of random windows on a long workspace, while preparing slides for a uni scientific presentation. All kinds of various PDFs, file managers, InkScape, GIMP and so on.
Horizontal mouse headerbar drag to scroll the view was a lifesaver. Definitely a good choice adding this. Along with scrolling the view on DnD near the screen edge. Going through the overview, or always through the keyboard, would be very annoying.
yuxqiu just improved the default GPU detection logic in Smithay, so niri-git now works out of the box on Asahi and Pinephone devices, without having to manually configure render-drm-device!
Experimenting with a restructure of the niri rendering code to uncurse it somewhat by getting rid of all complex impl Iterator chains and lifetimes, which also lets me remove some intermediate small Vecs. In essence, going from pull to push iteration.
I'm surprised that the result is consistently 2-3x faster than before. Wonder if it's the Vecs, or if inverting (massive) codegen'd iterators into a normal call stack passing a closure arg, providing the main benefit
It even ended up with a negative delta (+762 -780) which is always a W.
Btw I ran the comparison on my Eee PC and there the difference is even more extreme, like 8x faster rendering list construction (which is once again only a part of the total rendering time, and notably doesn't include actual rendering, but still nice).
i'm reviving the PR integrating Tracy GPU profiling into Smithay. Here are two test captures from niri: one for normal + screencast rendering, one for iGPU + dGPU monitor rendering
Looking for ideas on how to go about translating niri (the binary, and the wiki). If you have experience doing this with other FOSS projects, please share:
Is there any good way of moving a process into a systemd StartTransientScope together with its children?
In niri we put spawned processes into scopes, so oomd and other stuff can work properly. Usually you do it by putting yourself into a scope, then exec-ing the target program. But that's a 7 ms toll on startup time, so in niri we spawn the program right away, and then put it into a scope. However, if the program forks fast enough, that child doesn't go into the scope..
niri can now include the mouse pointer on window screenshots, a feature that had several more edge cases than I thought before starting to work on it (and it's likely not the ones you think, those ones were easy)
Merged another long time overdue niri PR: mouse cursor via metadata in PipeWire screencasts (lets you toggle Show Cursor on/off in OBS), and full mouse cursor support in window casts.
The cursor is visible only when the window is receiving mouse events—if you're moving the mouse on top of something else covering the target window, the cursor won't be (unintentionally) painted.
Thanks @abmantis for driving this, including debugging a memory bug in PW!
Working on a screencast IPC for niri. The idea is to give info to desktop bars to be able to add a screencast indicator whenever something is recording the screen.
Got it hooked up for both PipeWire (obviously) and wlr-screencopy. For the latter there's no good way to tell if something is a screencast so I went with some heuristics.
Here's the icon working on the DMS bar, as well as a popup with the full available info I made for debugging.
So yeah, I'm working on blur for niri. I'm doing "xray blur" first where the idea is that you only include background surfaces, so you pretty much never have to redo the blur—next to zero perf impact unless you have a video wallpaper or smth.
Turns out that it's quite tricky to do well, especially with our Overview. I'm like on my third refactor attempt now but I think I've got a good approach.
During this video there's no reblurring whatsoever, all just drawing cached static textures.
