So a bit under 3 years ago, I made my infamous Wayland rant post that is likely the most read post on this blog by miles. I should really actually write about music again one of these days, but that’s a topic for another time. The language was perhaps a bit inflammatory, but I felt the criticisms I made at the time were fair. It was primarily born out some frustrations I had with the entire ecosystem, and it was not like I was the only sole voice. There are other people out there you can find that encountered their own unique Wayland problems and wrote about it.
With that post, I probably cast myself as some anti-Wayland guy which is my own doing, but I promise you that is not the case. You can check my mpv commits, and it’s businesses as usual. Lots of Wayland fixes, features, and all that good stuff. Quite some time has passed since then, and it is really overdue look at the situation again with all the new developments in mind. To be frank, my original post is very outdated and it is not fair to leave it up in its current state without acknowledging the work that has been done. So in comparison to 3 years ago, I have a much more positive outlook now.
As someone who hasn’t yet moved to Wayland, how good is support these days for alternate keyboard mappings? Is this something that each individual window manager needs to support, or does Wayland itself manage them?
Not just “international keyboard” support, but truly arbitrary keyboard/symbol mapping support. I muddle in programming with APL, which needs its own key mapping with Unicode symbols.
I recall KDE had its own mapping support which used some system APL layout but I’d rather not have key mappings tied to a specific window manager.
Not sure exactly what you’re referring to, but you can pretty much change everything about your keyboard layout with kmonad and keyd
I’ll look into those, thank you!
(I currently set up my APL keymap via .Xmodmap with xmodmap, and setxkbmap for X11 terms, and with ‘loadkeys’ for console.)
I use Wayland exclusively, but unfortunately I don’t think I have an answer for you since I’m not entirely familiar with this idea. Is your concern just for the configuration of a universal set of hotkeys configured within the compositor rather than a desktop environment?
I wasn’t aware that x11 facilitated this. I’d have figured keyboard mappings are abstracted from the compositor and left to the DE to handle, aside from core binds that allow dropping back to tty
I’m not sure I fully understood what you said, but I have messed around with changing layouts, as I use Colemak. It’s really annoying to have GDM or SDDM default to QWERTY.
The “correct” way to do it is to use
localectl [--no-convert] set-x11-keymap us,us "" colemak, grp:win_space_toggle, and that changes the relevant config files. So, Wayland is pulling from X11 configs (I think).Great info! I will try it when I decide to trial-run Wayland again, thank you!
(Some things I had read online suggested that Wayland did not use the x11 configs. If it does, that’s good news.)
I sincerely hope it works for you! That
--no-configflag tellslocalectlnot to change the layout for the TTY consoles, and it might be important to include for systems with encryption (I don’t understand why, just something I saw when reading on the Arch wiki).