Wayland tales: basic compositing stuff
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It's been a month now that I've started writing my own Wayland 
compositor library based off wlroots, libowl[0].
My initial goal was to achieve parity with my current X11 setup, which 
is really very simple. All I really need is move/resize windows with 
the mouse and maximize windows with a keystroke.

And boy, this is hard.

I knew wlroots was a "batteries not included" kind of library, and I 
was prepared to having to write a lot of code (way more so than with 
libwm/glazier/wmutils). But I didn't expect how deep this would go...

The wayland protocol helps you get pixels moving on the screen. Making 
sense of these pixels is done with agreed upon protocols, like "XDG 
shells" or "session lock".

And you need to implement every single one of these to get the most 
basic functionality of your compositor !

I've reached a point in libowl[0] where I could dogfeed myself and use 
my own compositor. And I'm nowhere near finished... Because I now need 
to implement the freaking "drag'n'drop" protocol if I want to reattach 
Firefox tabs to its own freaking windows ! And idle inhibitor, and 
session lock, and zones...

I'm tired, boss.

--  
~wgs

[0]: gopher://z3bra.org:70/1/scm/libowl/log.gph

20260409.0909