pinnacle/README.md

Pinnacle

A very, VERY WIP Smithay-based wayland compositor

Features

• Winit backend
• Udev backend
  • This is currently just a copy of Anvil's udev backend.
• Basic tags
• Layout system
  • Left master stack, corner, dwindle, spiral layouts
  • Other three master stack directions, floating, magnifier, maximized, and fullscreen layouts
  • Resizable layouts
• XWayland support
• Layer-shell support
• Server-side decorations
• Animations and blur and all that pizazz
• Widget system
• The other stuff Awesome has
• Is very cool 👍

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

• Arch:

  sudo pacman -S wayland libxkbcommon systemd-libs libinput libgdm seatd
  

• Debian:

  sudo apt install libwayland-dev libxkbcommon-dev libudev-dev libinput-dev libgdm-dev libseat-dev
  

• TODO: other distros.

You'll also need Lua 5.4 for configuration.

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 few options.

Pinnacle supports configuration through Lua (and hopefully more languages if it's not too unwieldy 🦀).

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 this table into your Lua language server settings:

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

Doc website soon™️

Controls

The following controls are currently hardcoded:

• Ctrl + Left Mouse: Move a window
• Ctrl + Right Mouse: Resize a window
• Ctrl + Alt + Shift + Esc: Kill Pinnacle. This is for when the compositor inevitably locks up because I did a dumb thing 👍

You can find the rest of the controls in the example_config.