Sway

sway is a compositor for Wayland designed to be fully compatible with i3.


Sway is a drop-in replacement for the i3 window manager, but for Wayland instead of X11. It works with your existing i3 configuration and supports most of i3's features, and a few extras.
— swaywm.org

Status

Sway is a work-in-progress so caution is advised. However, the project's creator, Drew DeVault (aka SirCmpwn) has deemed ready for regular use.

A detailed accounting of what features have been implemented and what features are still outstanding can be found at the following links:

Installation

sway can be installed with the sway package (or sway-gitAUR for the latest git version). If you already use i3, then copy your i3 configuration to ~/.config/sway/config and it will work out of the box. Otherwise, copy the sample configuration file to ~/.config/sway/config. It is located at /etc/sway/config, unless the DFALLBACK_CONFIG_DIR flag has been set. See the sway(5) man page for information on the configuration.

Starting sway

From a terminal

You can start sway by simply typing sway in a terminal.

Using a display manager

The sway session is located at /usr/share/wayland-sessions/sway.desktop. It is automatically recognized by GDM.

From X

If you want to start sway in an X session for testing purposes it is possible to start it as a regular program.

Configuration

Keymap

By default, sway starts with the US QWERTY keymap. You can override this behaviour by starting sway with

$ XKB_DEFAULT_LAYOUT=gb XKB_DEFAULT_VARIANT=colemak XKB_DEFAULT_MODEL=pc101 sway

This will launch sway with the keyboard set to the Colemak variant of the British keymap with the 101-key keyboard model.

If you are using a display manager, you can not simply prepend the above line to the sway.desktop file. As root, create the following file:

/usr/bin/sway-gb-ck
#!/bin/sh
XKB_DEFAULT_LAYOUT=gb XKB_DEFAULT_VARIANT=colemak XKB_DEFAULT_MODEL=pc101 sway

Then, create a sway-gb-ck.desktop file that starts the above script:

/usr/share/wayland-sessions/sway-gb-ck.desktop
[Desktop Entry]
Name=Sway British(Colemak)
Comment=SirCmpwn's Wayland window manager with the British Colemak keyboard layout
Exec=sway-gb-ck
Type=Application

Statusbar

Installing the program i3status is an easy way to get a practical, default statusbar. All one has to do is add following snippet at the end of your sway config:

~/.config/sway/config
 bar {
  status_command i3status
 }

If you want to achieve colored output of i3status, you can adjust following part in the i3status configuration:

~/.config/i3status/config
general {
        colors = true
        interval = 5
}

In both examples, the system-wide installed configuration files has been copied over to the user directory and then modified.

Wallpaper

This line, which can be appended at the end of your sway configuration, sets a background image on all displays (output matches all with name "*"):

~/.config/sway/config
 output "*" background /home/onny/pictures/fredwang_norway.jpg fill

Of course you have to replace the file name and path according to your wallpaper.

Input devices

Its possible to tweak specific input device configurations. For example to enable tap-to-click and natural scolling for a touchpad, add an input block:

~/.config/sway/config
input "2:14:ETPS/2_Elantech_Touchpad" {
    tap enabled
    natural_scroll enabled
}

Where as the device identifier can be queried with:

swaymsg -t get_inputs

The output from the command, sometimes has a "\" to escape symbols like "/" (ie "2:14:ETPS\/2_Elantech_Touchpad") and it needs to be removed.

More documentation and options like acceleration profiles can be found with:

man sway-input

HiDPI

Set your displays scale factor with the output command in your config file. The scale factor must be an integer, and is usually 2 for HiDPI screens.

output <name> scale <factor>

You can find your display name with the following command:

swaymsg -t get_outputs

Custom keybindings

Special keys on your keyboard can be used to execute commands, for example to control your volume or your monitor brightness:

~/.config/sway/config
 bindsym XF86AudioRaiseVolume exec pactl set-sink-volume $(pacmd list-sinks |awk '/* index:/{print $3}') +5%
 bindsym XF86AudioLowerVolume exec pactl set-sink-volume $(pacmd list-sinks |awk '/* index:/{print $3}') -5%
 bindsym XF86AudioToggle exec pactl set-sink-mute $(pacmd list-sinks |awk '/* index:/{print $3}') toggle
 bindsym XF86MonBrightnessDown exec dsplight down 5
 bindsym XF86MonBrightnessUp exec dsplight up 5

You many need to change the sound card index to 1 or 2 depending on your system configuration. See Backlight for a list of utilities to control brightness and color correction.

Known issues

Using i3-dmenu-desktop

i3-dmenu-desktop is not usable directly from sway, but a patch is available here : https://github.com/i3/i3/pull/2265/files Unfortunately, the patch cannot be merged because it breaks when used from i3 in some corner cases.

See here for more information: https://github.com/SirCmpwn/sway/issues/521

You can still apply the patch manually though:

$ wget 'https://patch-diff.githubusercontent.com/raw/i3/i3/pull/2265.patch'
# patch -p0 /usr/bin/i3-dmenu-desktop < 2265.patch

See also