Sway review

Updated Wednesday, Oct 25, 2023

Wayland Linux Gentoo Retrocomputing

Hello, my name is Winny and welcome to my honest review of Sway, a i3wm compatible Wayland compositor. Its primary appeal is a compositor experience that is easy to install, and familiar to i3 users. For my usage, it is one of the few compositors flexible enough to deploy on older hardware.

§Startup

Sway does require a bit of effort and time to get it in a usable state from the stock configuration. That was my experience.

§Keyboard layout isn’t easy to set up

When sway comes up, it’ll present to you a standard US English keyboard layout. I find this kind of strange given the main dev appears to be French. Perhaps it is a technical challenge, instead of design choice. On the other hand, KDE Wayland on NixOS picked up my keyboard layout some way or another.

Now to configure keyboard, you have to first break any assumption that Sway can pick up the keyboard layout from its environment. This isn’t how it works. Next you’ll want to review sway(1), sway(5), sway-input(5) because the usage isn’t baked into the programs so --help will show synopsis, but not how to use it. Still with me? Great. Next string together several discrete concepts documented in each of the man-pages:

  1. Configuration syntax, semantics, and where the files are read from (sway(5))
  2. How to change the runtime sway configuration (swaymsg(1))
  3. How to make it permanent (sway(1), sway(5))
  4. How to select any device when using the input command (input * ...). (sway-input(5))
  5. How to select the keyboard layout using the xkb_* settings (sway-input(5)): 
    input '*' xkb_layout us
input '*' xkb_variant dvorak

This is the very first thing most non-English-native users will do, yet it requires about 15-45 minutes of research to get past this initial hurdle.

By the way, swaymsg input '*' xkb_variant dvorak didn’t seem to work. I had to restart sway to apply the above configuration changes.

Over the years I’ve played this dance of re-learning how to configure the keyboard layout in Sway six times. Thankfully this article now exists. Some of the funny ways that I’ve messed it up:

  • a few web-pages use the word “keyboard” as a placeholder like input keyboard xkb_variant dvorak and this doesn’t work of course. And you’ll get no feedback that the device named “keyboard” is missing either.
  • Making assumptions that sway picks up keyboard from environment, partially caused by using chat gpt-4 (because I couldn’t figure out where else to search, web search results are mostly line noise).
  • Not quoting the asterisk that may become a glob in certain cases
  • confusing xkb_layout with xkb_variant and getting an error message that isn’t clear as day about what the problem is.

This list demonstrates many unique failure modes when configuring a keyboard.

§Using sway on my thinkpad x31

As part of my retrocomputing project, I tested sway on my old Thinkpad. This is important because xorg-server is not getting much love anymore. Time to show retrocomputer users that sway can work on their builds too!

Indeed, sway works on the thinkpad x31. Unfortunately it does requires user intervention to launch correctly. WLR_RENDERER=pixman sway works. Without overriding the renderer, it’ll try to access the GPU using DRI, even if you have llvmpipe set up:

radeon: Invalid PCI ID.
libEGL warning: egl: failed to create dri2 screen
00:00:00.112 [ERROR] [wlr] [EGL] command: eglInitialize, error: EGL_NOT_INITIALIZED (0x3001), message: "DRI2: failed to create screen"
radeon: Failed to get PCI ID, error number -13
libEGL warning: egl: failed to create dri2 screen
00:00:00.133 [ERROR] [wlr] [EGL] command: eglInitialize, error: EGL_NOT_INITIALIZED (0x3001), message: "DRI2: failed to create screen"
00:00:00.133 [ERROR] [wlr] [EGL] command: eglInitialize, error: EGL_NOT_INITIALIZED (0x3001), message: "eglInitialize"
00:00:00.133 [ERROR] [wlr] [render/egl.c:264] Failed to initialize EGL
00:00:00.133 [ERROR] [wlr] [render/egl.c:554] Failed to initialize EGL context
00:00:00.133 [ERROR] [wlr] [render/gles2/renderer.c:679] Could not initialize EGL
00:00:00.134 [ERROR] [wlr] [render/wlr_renderer.c:333] Could not initialize renderer
00:00:00.134 [ERROR] [sway/server.c:79] Failed to create renderer

Weirdly, tinywl (the wlroots example compositor) launched without user intervention. I can confirm llvmpipe works because under X11 it shows llvmpipe as my driver (in glxinfo). I asked around and this Mesa project merge request might be the long-term fix.

It’s a little slow on a Pentium-M with software rendering. Still, quite amazing! Alacritty, which requires 3d acceleration, runs. glxgears gives me 20s of frames per second. Absolutely amazing that it works! Thanks to llvmpipe and pixman.

Another tradeoff- utilizing CPU time for 3d acceleration yields a toasty laptop and noisy fan, at least on this Pentium-m platform. Irregardless, I think it is prudent to ensure sway works on older gear - xorg-server isn’t getting any younger.

§Using sway on Gentoo

The gentoo ebuild ships a broken config by default. Remove this line to fix the default startup error:

output * bg /usr/share/backgrounds/sway/Sway_Wallpaper_Blue_1920x1080.png fill

It appears there is a local wallpapers USE flag on sway, however it also appears the meson configuration has a built-time flag to install wallpapers. I think it’s possibly an upstream bug (Sway, not Gentoo) related to the template config.in.

§Resources online

Here’s a list of resources to review if stuck with Sway;

  • i3wm documentation - it reads well, has pictures, mostly applies to sway.
  • sway(1), sway(5), sway-input(5), sway-output(5), sway-bar(5), sway-ipc(7). Here is a PDF for casual reading. All 68 pages; a couple more pages than rsync(1).
  • You’ll want to review wlroots, libdrm, mesa, libinput documentation. These libraries are the underpinnings of sway and impact how sway works, so you’ll have to understand how to troubleshoot these libraries too.
  • There is a Sway wiki. The wiki is easy to miss- I didn’t know this website existed until somebody told me about it - after drafting this article. It appears to discuss keyboard layouts at length.
  • Your distro’s support chat. You’ll have better results asking configuration questions there.
  • Your wayland friend who knows way too much about wayland.

§Ratpoison style keys

I’m a fan of a single prefix key in window managers/terminal multiplexers. This keeps my keyboard shortcuts free for application use. This style of interface control is used by tmux, screen, ratpoison, stumpwm, and other software. Here are few keyboard shortcuts modeling this ratpoison style of keyboard chording. This Thinkpad x31 machine doesn’t have a windows/mod4 key, so I was using the config with Alt/Mod1. Using this layout I can type C-i c to start a terminal emulator, and C-i k to close it, C-i g 1 to go to workspace 1, so on.

bindsym Control+i mode "RootMap"
mode "RootMap" {
     bindsym Escape mode "default"
     bindsym c exec $term; mode "default"
     bindsym Exclam exec $menu; mode "default"
     bindsym k kill; mode "default"
     bindsym g mode "GroupMap"
     bindsym Backslash reload
     bindsym f fullscreen toggle; mode "default"
}

mode "GroupMap" {
     bindsym Escape mode "default"
     bindsym 1 workspace number 1; mode "default"
     bindsym 2 workspace number 2; mode "default"
     bindsym 3 workspace number 3; mode "default"
     bindsym 4 workspace number 4; mode "default"
     bindsym 5 workspace number 5; mode "default"
     bindsym 6 workspace number 6; mode "default"
     bindsym 7 workspace number 7; mode "default"
     bindsym 8 workspace number 8; mode "default"
     bindsym 9 workspace number 9; mode "default"
}

This set of keybinds is far from complete and unlocks basic usage of sway in my workflows. Some keys that I couldn’t figure out:

  • C-i C-i should focus last focused window/container regardless of location.
  • C-i i should send a literal C-i keystroke to the current window/container.

If you know how to do this, please educate me :).

§My personal rating

4/5. It does what it says on the tin - no flicker, manages windows, has a flexible IPC for remote control, can do ratpoison style keyboard shortcuts. Personally I find the i3wm/sway container model confusing and hard to use correctly, so as long as I stay away from clever layouts, I may remain productive.

The barrier to productivity is unreasonably high due to the lack of examples and tutorial content on configuring Sway. The hard-to-discover wiki should not be discounted. Hopefully this article helps reduce that barrier by a smidge.

I hope that Sway will be used in my retro-computing distro project (stay tuned!), however it may be difficult to integrate if user intervention is required to repair the configuration for the user’s specified language settings or GPU configuration.

-Winny

§Thanks

Major thanks to landon, bl4ckb0ne, sircmpwn, bard, and (anybody who I forgot to list - sorry!) for reviewing this article.