What's this?

Swaymux aims at making navigation in sway easier. To achieve this, swaymux provides a main interface listing the full tree of outputs, workspaces, containers, as well as the scratchpad. This main interface is primarily inspired by tmux. Swaymux can be navigated using the keyboard, with keybindings that closely follow the tmux bindings.

This project is not feature-complete, far from it. So far swaymux supports listing and navigating into outputs, workspaces and containers, creating a new workspace, or creating a workspace with all currently marked containers. The user can close applications without first focusing their windows, as well as view debug information (e.g. whether a window uses native wayland or xwayland). The scratchpad is supported too, both for dumping and retrieving windows from swaymux.

Planned features and fixes include a closer look at performance tweaking, as well as maybe iconification of containers where applicable.

Installing

Requirements

This system expects the $SWAY_SOCK environment variable to be set and the associated socket to be bindable. If that isn't the case, this program will fail to launch. Further, on Nix and NixOS the runtime dependencies should already be packaged. For any other system i currently do not have a good way to test, but a valid QT QPA platform plugin should be all that is needed runtime.

Nix and NixOS

Swaymux is packaged as a nix flake. It can be tested using nix run git+https://git.grimmauld.de/Grimmauld/swaymux, this will build and launch swaymux in a temporary environment that will be removed at next garbage collect in store.

To install swaymux permanently, add the flake input, e.g. using the following snippet:

swaymux = {
  url = "git+https://git.grimmauld.de/Grimmauld/swaymux";
  inputs.nixpkgs.follows = "nixpkgs";
};

Make sure you can request inputs as part of where you install it. Adding swaymux to the actual system then is as easy as putting it into your packages:

environment.systemPackages = [
  inputs.swaymux.packages."${system}".default
];

If you want to directly copy this, keep in mind you'll need to make the system and inputs constants available, e.g. by setting specialArgs = { inherit inputs system; }; as part of your nixosSystem definition in your systems flake.

Other systems

This project uses cmake and requires the nlohman json library as well as QT6. Last time I tested, both GCC and clang compilers worked. Therefore, the classic installation process with cmake, make and make install should just work, though I currently do not have a good way to test.

Integrating with sway

Once the package is available, it can be made available in sway by keybinding. Setting swaymux to be floating is recommended.

for_window [app_id="swaymux"] floating enable
bindsym $mod+c exec swaymux

Available key bindings can be viewed in-App.

Developing

On Nix, the flake makes nix develop available, which provides a development environment with all the required dependencies. It does however not provide an IDE by itself. On any other system, or if you don't like nix develop, the standard way of developing cmake based c++ projects should work. Just make sure both compile and runtime dependencies are available.