pinnacle/README.md

Pinnacle

A very, VERY WIP Smithay-based wayland compositor

Info

Why Pinnacle?

Well, I currently use Awesome. And I really like it! Unfortunately, Awesome doesn't exist for Wayland (anymore). There doesn't seem to be any Wayland compositor out there that has all of the following:

• Tags for window management
• Configurable in Lua (or any other programming language for that matter)
• Has a bunch of batteries included (widget system, systray, etc)

So, this is my attempt at making an Awesome-esque Wayland compositor.

Dependencies

You'll need the following packages, as specified by Smithay:

libwayland
libxkbcommon
libudev
libinput
libgdm
libseat

Package names will vary across distros. TODO: list those names.

Building

Build the project with:

cargo build [--release]

Running

After building, run the executable located in either:

./target/debug/pinnacle --<backend>     // without --release
./target/release/pinnacle --<backend>   // with --release

Or, run the project directly with

cargo run [--release] -- --<backend>

backend can be one of two values:

• winit: run Pinnacle as a window in your graphical environment
• udev: run Pinnacle in a tty. NOTE: I tried running udev in Awesome and some things broke so uh, don't do that

Configuration

Please note: this is VERY WIP and has basically no options yet.

Pinnacle supports configuration through Lua (and hopefully more languages if I architect it correctly 🦀).

Run Pinnacle with the PINNACLE_CONFIG environment variable set to the path of your config file. If not specified, Pinnacle will look for the following:

$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/pinnacle/init.lua
~/.config/pinnacle/init.lua         // if XDG_CONFIG_HOME isn't set

The following will use the example config file in api/lua:

PINNACLE_CONFIG="./api/lua/example_config.lua" cargo run -- --<backend>

Autocomplete and that cool stuff

It is highly recommended to use the Lua language server and set it up to have the api/lua directory as a library, as I'll be using its doc comments to provide autocomplete and error checking.

For VS Code:

Install the Lua plugin, then go into its settings and add the absolute(?) path to the api/lua directory to Workspace: Library.

For Neovim:

Pass

Lua = {
    workspace = {
        library = {
            "/path/to/pinnacle/api/lua"
        }
    }
}

into your Lua language server settings.

Controls

The following controls are currently hardcoded:

• Esc: Stop Pinnacle
• Ctrl + Left Mouse: Move a window
• Ctrl + Right Mouse: Resize a window
• Shift + L: Open Alacritty
• Shift + K: Open Nautilus
• Shift + J: Open Kitty
• Shift + H: Open Foot

The following controls are set in the example_config:

• Ctrl + Alt + C: Close the currently focused window
• Ctrl + Alt + Space: Toggle "floating" for the currently focused window

"Floating" is in quotes because while windows do currently tile themselves, tiled ones can still be moved just like a floating window. Toggling to and from floating will retile all tiled windows.

The only layout currently is a master stack with the master on the left side.

A Small Note

This is currently just a summer project I'm working on, but I hope that I can work on it enough that it becomes somewhat usable! If development slows down during the rest of the year, it's because ⭐university⭐.