Tracking issue for v0.3

[Ottatop]

v0.3: Dreaming of Other Selves

The main goal of 0.3 is to stabilize Snowcap, the widget system we're currently using to draw the quit prompt, bind overlay, and focus border+titlebar (this may very well be a case of biting off more than you can chew). Once stabilized, we'll have the pieces necessary to add in a taskbar and I can finally implement minimizing!

In order to not have an entire 6 month period where the stable release has bugs that I've been too lazy to backport fixes for, I'm actually going to commit to releasing some minor versions for bugfixes and small feature updates this time around.

Goals

• Stabilize Snowcap
  • More iced-agnostic widget representation Not worth the hassle
  • Theming support
  • Cursor shape
  • Clipboard handling
    • Might be difficult as iced 0.14's Clipboard trait is synchronous and we don't have access to the state in the clipboard handler
• Taskbar
  • Taglist
  • Tasklist
  • Tray
• Window minimizing (Add window minimizing #236)
• Add resize handles to decorations
  • Depends on snowcap: add mouse_area widget #364

Nice to Haves

• Rounded corners

[Ph4ntomas]

How do you see the taskbar working ? Would that be a new kind of surface in snowcap 'server-side', or a framework in the client-side libraries buit on top of Layer and widgets ?

If it's the latter, I have done some work on that front in my own library that could be upstreamed or ported to snowcap if you're interested (both rust & lua implementation are done already).

[Ottatop]

I see the taskbar as being a combination of a server-side "source" with client-side widgets, so closer to the latter without the need to reimplement things like dbus in multiple languages. For example with a tray, there would be a server-side implementation of whatever dbus protocol is used that feeds that information to the client to build widgets. Though this is pretty much just napkin planning at this point in time, I haven't put too much thought into this.

I have done some work on that front in my own library that could be upstreamed or ported to snowcap if you're interested (both rust & lua implementation are done already).

Sounds good! I'll take a look at it when we get around to implementing the taskbar and see if we can't yoink parts or all of the implementation.

[Ph4ntomas]

without the need to reimplement things like dbus in multiple languages.

Well this will be needed for deeper integration of dbus and/or custom elements depending on dbus, unless snowcap proxies dbus as a whole (which wouldn't be a good idea imo).
Assuming snowcap keeps to rust/lua, users can already add zbus as their config dependency for the rust side, and I've implemented a zbus inspired api for lua (for the lib I mentioned before, since I've implementing SNI for a tray area there, too).

The alternative is for everyone to fork snowcap or have some way to load modules dynamically, which isn't exactly easy/good practice in rust.

But yeah I agree, some shared/common components should absolutely be handled server-side either because they depends on wayland protocol that need to be bridged (foreign top level and workspace comes to mind), because there are some dbus protocol we want to be available at all time (like system notifier watcher for tray), or simply because there's no good reason to reimplement those everytime

I have some ideas for a few of those in the form of custom widget, I'll open issues to present them in a more formal way.

[Ph4ntomas]

I think snowcap should also get support for FDo icon theme (https://specifications.freedesktop.org/icon-theme/latest/), potentially in the form of a custom widget.

SNI items (to implement systray) send their icons as an lookup path and a filename without extension.
Afaik the lookup path is optional and meant as a fallback if the theme doesn't contain a version of the app icon.

The lookup should be easy to do in rust, and can be done in lua, but a proper 'icon' widget would be best IMO

[Ph4ntomas]

Sounds good! I'll take a look at it when we get around to implementing the taskbar and see if we can't yoink parts or all of the implementation.

@Ottatop It occurs to me that you might not want to have to read 30k+ lines to decide whether the bar/client side widget system I wrote would fit your view for pinnacle, so I wrote a document to explain the overall design. I'll try to keep it up to date on my side, but for now it explains everyting bar related.

https://github.com/Ph4ntomas/glacier/blob/main/doc/design.md