Sway

sway is a compositor for Wayland designed to be fully compatible with i3. According to the official website:

Sway is a drop-in replacement for the i3 window manager, but for Wayland instead of X11. It works with your existing i3 configuration and supports most of i3's features, and a few extras.

Status

Sway is a work-in-progress so caution is advised. However, the project's creator, Drew DeVault (aka SirCmpwn) has deemed it ready for regular use.

A detailed accounting of what features have been implemented and what features are still outstanding can be found at the following links:

• i3 feature support
• IPC feature support
• i3bar compatibility
• Airblader fork features

Installation

sway can be installed with the sway package. This will install the stable, but abandoned, 0.15 version which is based on the (also abandoned) wlc library.

At the time of writing, sway 1.0-alpha - based on the new wlroots library - is under active development and quite stable. Install the following two Arch User Repository packages instead: wlroots-git^AUR and sway-git^AUR.

It's advisable to always update wlroots when you update sway, due to tight dependencies.

Starting sway

Tip: See Wayland#GUI libraries for appropriate environment variables to set for window decoration libraries.

From a TTY, on login

You can start sway by simply typing sway from your TTY. To start sway from tty1 on login with default US keyboard edit .bash_profile use this code:

~/.bash_profile

if [[ -z $DISPLAY ]] && [[ $(tty) = /dev/tty1 ]]; then
  XKB_DEFAULT_LAYOUT=us exec sway
fi

Using a display manager

Note: Sway does not support display managers officially.

The sway session is located at /usr/share/wayland-sessions/sway.desktop. It is automatically recognized by modern display managers like GDM and SDDM.

Configuration

If you already use i3, then copy your i3 configuration to ~/.config/sway/config and it should work out of the box. Otherwise, copy the sample configuration file to ~/.config/sway/config. It is located at /etc/sway/config, unless the DFALLBACK_CONFIG_DIR flag has been set. See sway(5) for information on the configuration.

Keymap

By default, sway starts with the US QWERTY keymap. You can override this behaviour by starting sway with

$ export XKB_DEFAULT_LAYOUT=gb; export XKB_DEFAULT_VARIANT=colemak; export XKB_DEFAULT_MODEL=pc101; sway

This will launch sway with the keyboard set to the Colemak variant of the British keymap with the 101-key keyboard model.

If you are using a display manager, you can not simply prepend the above line to the sway.desktop file. As root, create the following file:

/usr/bin/sway-gb-ck

#!/bin/sh
XKB_DEFAULT_LAYOUT=gb XKB_DEFAULT_VARIANT=colemak XKB_DEFAULT_MODEL=pc101 sway

Then, create a sway-gb-ck.desktop file that starts the above script:

/usr/share/wayland-sessions/sway-gb-ck.desktop

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Sway British(Colemak)
Comment=SirCmpwn's Wayland window manager with the British Colemak keyboard layout
Exec=sway-gb-ck
Type=Application

If none of the above solutions worked for you, you may want to add

$ export XKB_DEFAULT_LAYOUT=gb; export XKB_DEFAULT_VARIANT=colemak; export XKB_DEFAULT_MODEL=pc101

to either your .bash_profile or .zprofile.

If you want multiple keyboard layouts at startup edit .bash_profile and add, for example US English and German layouts, switchable by Mod+Space:

~/.bash_profile

if [[ -z $DISPLAY ]] && [[ $(tty) = /dev/tty1 ]]; then
  export XKB_DEFAULT_LAYOUT=us,de
  export XKB_DEFAULT_OPTIONS=grp:win_space_toggle
  exec sway
fi

Other options for switching keyboard layout is Alt+Shift: grp:alt_shift_toggle

Statusbar

Installing the program i3status is an easy way to get a practical, default statusbar. All one has to do is add following snippet at the end of your sway config:

~/.config/sway/config

 bar {
  status_command i3status
 }

If you want to achieve colored output of i3status, you can adjust following part in the i3status configuration:

~/.config/i3status/config

general {
        colors = true
        interval = 5
}

In both examples, the system-wide installed configuration files has been copied over to the user directory and then modified.

Wallpaper

This line, which can be appended at the end of your sway configuration, sets a background image on all displays (output matches all with name "*"):

~/.config/sway/config

 output "*" background /home/onny/pictures/fredwang_norway.jpg fill

Of course you have to replace the file name and path according to your wallpaper.

Input devices

Its possible to tweak specific input device configurations. For example to enable tap-to-click and natural scolling for a touchpad, add an input block:

~/.config/sway/config

input "2:14:ETPS/2_Elantech_Touchpad" {
    tap enabled
    natural_scroll enabled
}

Where as the device identifier can be queried with:

swaymsg -t get_inputs

The output from the command, sometimes has a "\" to escape symbols like "/" (ie "2:14:ETPS\/2_Elantech_Touchpad") and it needs to be removed.

More documentation and options like acceleration profiles can be found in sway-input(5).

HiDPI

Set your displays scale factor with the output command in your config file. The scale factor must be an integer, and is usually 2 for HiDPI screens.

output <name> scale <factor>

You can find your display name with the following command:

swaymsg -t get_outputs

Custom keybindings

Special keys on your keyboard can be used to execute commands, for example to control your volume or your monitor brightness:

~/.config/sway/config

 bindsym XF86AudioRaiseVolume exec pactl set-sink-volume $(pacmd list-sinks |awk '/* index:/{print $3}') +5%
 bindsym XF86AudioLowerVolume exec pactl set-sink-volume $(pacmd list-sinks |awk '/* index:/{print $3}') -5%
 bindsym XF86AudioMute exec pactl set-sink-mute $(pacmd list-sinks |awk '/* index:/{print $3}') toggle
 bindsym XF86MonBrightnessDown exec brightnessctl set 5%-
 bindsym XF86MonBrightnessUp exec brightnessctl set +5%

To control brightness you can use brightnessctl^AUR. For a list of utilities to control brightness and color correction see Backlight

.Xresources

Copy .Xresources to .Xdefaults to use them in sway.

Tips and tricks

dmenu replacement

As dmenu runs on XWayland, the applicions tends to become unresponsive if the focus is moved elsewhere, requiring a sway restart, to fix the broken, always visible and unresponsive dmenu. Rofi is a nice option, yet, to automatically focus rofi as a menu, it needs to be run from urxvt or other non-wayland-native virtual terminal. Invoking it as menu in sway will not focus on the menu (you have to hover the mouse on rofi, for rofi to grab your input) One of the best workarounds could be found https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/1367#issuecomment-332910152 :

Known issues

Using i3-dmenu-desktop

i3-dmenu-desktop is not usable directly from sway, but a patch is available here: https://github.com/i3/i3/pull/2265/files Unfortunately, the patch cannot be merged because it breaks when used from i3 in some corner cases.

See here for more information: https://github.com/SirCmpwn/sway/issues/521

You can still apply the patch manually through installing sway-dmenu-desktop^{AUR[broken link: package not found]}. This creates a new binary called sway-dmenu-desktop to be using within sway.

An alternative is to use j4-dmenu-desktop^AUR, which is advertised as faster than i3-dmenu-desktop.

Using VirtualBox

Sway doesn't work well (or at all) under VirtualBox.

Sway Socket Not Detected

Using a swaymsg argument, such as swaymsg -t get_outputs, will sometimes return the message

sway socket not detected.
ERROR: Unable to connect to

when run inside a terminal multiplexer (such as gnu screen or tmux). This means swaymsg could not connect to the socket provided in your SWAYSOCK.

To view what the current value of SWAYSOCK is, type:

$ env | fgrep SWAYSOCK
SWAYSOCK=/run/user/1000/sway-ipc.1000.4981.sock

To work around this problem, you may try attaching to the first available sway socket, and retrying your command:

$ export SWAYSOCK=$(ls /run/user/*/sway-ipc.*.sock | head -n 1)

To avoid this error, run the command outside of a multiplexer.

Incorrect Monitor Resolution

Config options such as output "HDMI-A-1" res 1280x1024 may not successfully change the resolution. The compositor wlc is responsible for setting the resolution, and attempts to figure out monitor resolution from the TTY.

You may be able to alter your TTY resolution (thus also altering the WLC and Sway resolution) by passing a kernel parameter such as video=HDMI-A-1:1280x1024:e or with with custom edid binaries (see Kernel Mode Setting).

See also

• GitHub project
• Website