Sway

Sway
sway
Tiling Wayland compositor
Developer:
Drew DeVault (SirCmpwn)
License:
MIT License
Website:
https://swaywm.org/

Sway is a tiling Wayland compositor and a drop-in replacement for the i3 window manager for X11.

Tiling Wayland compositor
Drop-in replacement for the i3 window manager for X11
It works with your existing i3 configuration and supports most of i3's features, plus a few extras
and more...

Installation

Installing Sway will also pull other recommended packages such as sway-branding-upstream or patterns-sway-sway which is an opinionated set of packages that hopefully makes the Sway window manager work out of the box. The command to install Sway is

sudo zypper in sway

By default sway package comes with default upstream branding, there is also openSUSE branding for it. Sway is the dependency for openSUSE branding, so it could be installed all together by executing:

sudo zypper in sway-branding-openSUSE

Configuration

Sway wiki describes configuration in details.

To start from community defaults (if there is a need to change defaults):

mkdir -p ~/.config/sway
cp /etc/sway/config ~/.config/sway/
$EDITOR ~/.config/sway/config

If config already exists copy it to the ~/.config/sway/. Good practice is to use dotfiles, more details could be found here: Manage your dotfiles with Git.

Now it could be used it by running:

sway

Some info how to use it with login manager is bellow and in Sway wiki.

Login managers

Login managers might work but they aren't officially supported PR#3634.

Sway package installs /usr/share/wayland-sessions/sway.desktop and if installed login manager supports Wayland sessions, it should be possible to login into Sway.

Login managers that support Wayland sessions:

GDM
SDDM currently could run only under X11, but supports Wayland sessions. Support to add Wayland natively is tracked in PR #440.
LightDM has Wayland support as well.
greetd has wlgreet greeter for Wayland.

Application launcher

To launch application $menu variable could be set in Sway config file to run a launcher that would provide menu to the user and launch the application. For example in ~/.config/sway/config setup wofi as a launcher set $menu wofi.

Install needed application first, please refer to the instructions bellow.

dmenu

zypper in dmenu

Edit sway config file, for example vi ~/.config/sway/config:

# Your preferred application launcher
# Note: pass the final command to swaymsg so that the resulting window can be opened
# on the original workspace that the command was run on.
set $menu dmenu_path | dmenu -nb '#173f4f' -sb '#35b9ab' -nf '#73ba25' -sf '#173f4f' -fn 'Source Sans Pro-14' | xargs swaymsg exec --

fzf

zypper in fzf alacritty

Edit sway config file, for example vi ~/.config/sway/config:

set $menu alacritty --class 'launcher' --command bash -c 'compgen -c | sort -u | fzf --no-info --color="bg:#173f4f,fg:#35b9ab,bg+:#68cbc0,fg+:#516f7b,pointer:#173f4f,hl+:#173f4f,hl:#73ba25" | xargs -r swaymsg -t command exec'
for_window [app_id="^launcher$"] floating enable, border none, resize set width 400 px height 100 px, move position center

Fuzzel

Fuzzel is an application launcher for wlroots based Wayland compositors, similar to rofi's drun mode

zypper in fuzzel

Edit sway config file, for example vi ~/.config/sway/config:

set $menu fuzzel

wofi

Note: This project is currently not actively maintained.

zypper in wofi

Edit sway config file, for example vi ~/.config/sway/config:

set $menu wofi

More info about configuration and style could be found here:

Managing Monitors

Get the list of monitors

swaymsg -t get_outputs

Kanshi is a tool which helps managing multiple monitors

zypper in kanshi

External links