Almost exactly four months ago I announced Cage, my Wayland compositor for a kiosk-like environment. To the uninitiated: a kiosk is designed for running a single, maximized application and preventing the user from interacting with any other part of the system. You’ve probably seen many in your life in malls, stores or even the dentist (how satisfied are you with your service?). Kiosks can also be used for much cooler things, though, such as running home automation systems.
Since Cage’s announcement, the project was noticed by Phoronix and other websites. Users found their way and Cage quite quickly picked up some momentum. It has grown from just a hobby project for myself into a Wayland compositor with actual users. A small deviation but fun fact is that developing Cage has lead me to find bugs in several layers of the stack and applications, such as Firefox and Mesa.
As a result of this interest, the project has grown in scope significantly. Some of the new features are suggested by users and are clever use-cases that I had never anticipated or even imagined. For example, Drew DeVault, known for starting the sway and wlroots projects and other ambitious endeavors, is working on mimicking a Plan9 rio experience with Cage (see it running here) or using it as a “portal” to a remote sway session. Other features, such as XWayland, are accommodating Cage to the larger audience by providing a better and more smooth experience.
In this pre-release, Cage comes with support for:
XDG Shell. This protocol describes behavior you’d typically expect in a graphical desktop session. For example, it describes how to manipulate (minimize, maximize, fullscreen) windows. Naturally, Cage ignores some of these events and only implements this protocol to the extent necessary for a kiosk.
XWayland. This allows you to run X clients under Wayland. Obviously, applications are encouraged to upgrade and users are encouraged to use xdg-shell where possible, but in the case where migration is in-progress (e.g. Google Chrome), XWayland can help out. This is a compile-time feature: Cage can run without presence of any X11 libraries.
Mouse-, keyboard- and touch input. These should speak for themselves. A nice touch (pun not intended 😉) is that the cursor is hidden in case there is a touchscreen without a mouse.
Idle inhibit. This allows Cage to keep track of so-called inhibitors, which prevent idle behavior such as screen blanking or locking while for example a video is playing. Note that this requires a third party idle management daemon, such as swayidle.
Server side decorations. With GTK+ on Wayland, client side decorations are
the norm. KDE (and sway), however, prefer server side decorations. With the
implementation of the (new) xdg-server-decoration and (obsolete)
server-decoration protocols, Cage supports both client side- and server side
decorations. You can tell Cage to prefer (and communicate to supporting clients
the use of) server side decorations by using the -f flag. Note that
decorations do not make sense for Cage (as user interaction isn’t supported per
definition) and hence, Cage won’t draw any decorations when server side
decorations are preferred.
Copy and paste (also into and out of XWayland). This should also speak for itself. Primary selection is also included!
Damage tracking. With damage tracking, Cage only redraws the parts of the screen that changed. This makes Cage very resource- and power efficient.
Multiple, maximized applications in contrast to a single maximized application. When I first announced Cage, I planned on supporting only a single application window. However, due to feature requests, I changed my mind and Cage now supports multiple maximized and overlapping windows. That is, if Cage is launched with a terminal emulator and an application is launched from this terminal emulator, that application is placed “on top” of the terminal emulator and takes all input until it is closed. When this application is closed, the terminal emulator becomes visible again. Note that cycling between multiple windows is not possible.
Output rotation. Thanks to Tristan Daniel,
Cage now supports the rotation of outputs. Because of Cage’s nature, this is
“static”, i.e., output rotation is set on startup with the -r flag.
Specifying this flag multiple times results in multiple rotations of 90
degrees.
Last but not least, Cage now also has a logo! It is displayed in all its glory in the top right corner of this post.
In this release, there are 155 commits from 3 different authors. Issues have been reported by 9 users and Cage has been starred on GitHub 85 times. The signed release (6EBC43B1) is available on GitHub. Compile this version of Cage against wlroots 0.5.0.
The path to 1.0 is clear: I have tagged some issues on GitHub that I’d like to make it in 1.0. You can browse them in the milestone I created to track the progress. I think all of these features are critical for a stable release. It would be nice if we could get virtual keyboard support in as well, but I don’t want to block 1.0 on this as there is still work going on regarding this in Wayland. The only other issues are those regarding animations and effects. Likewise, this kind of eye candy isn’t critical and I don’t want to delay a stable release on it, as I expect it to be quite a lot of work.
As always, if you think you can help out with any of these issues (whether they’re tagged for 1.0 or not), please feel free to reach out! I can assist (and/or mentor) anyone willing to contribute.
For questions, comments or feedback you can reach me on Twitter, GitHub or email.