Miriway

Introducing Miriway

Miriway is a starting point for creating a Wayland based desktop environment using Mir.

At the core of Miriway is miriway-shell, a Mir based Wayland compositor that provides:

A "floating windows" window managament policy;
Support for Wayland (and via Xwayland) X11 applications;
Dynamic workspaces;
Additional Wayland support for "shell components" such as panels and docs; and,
Configurable shortcuts for launching standard apps such as launcher and terminal emulator.

In addition to miriway-shell, Miriway has:

A "terminal emulator finder" script miriway-terminal, that works with most terminal emulators;
A launch script miriway to simplify starting Miriway;
A default configuration file miriway-shell.config; and,
A greeter configuration miriway.desktop so Miriway can be selected at login

Miriway has been tested with shell components from several desktop environments and there are notes on enabling these in miriway-shell.config.

In development

Miriway uses the latest version of Mir available from the mir-team "release" PPA:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:mir-team/release

Dependencies

Build dependencies:

sudo apt install libmiral-dev

Additional runtime dependencies:

sudo apt install mir-graphics-drivers-desktop

The default install is minimal and provides a basic shell and a default Ctrl-Alt-T command that tries to find a terminal emulator (by using miriway-terminal). If you don't already have a terminal emulator installed, then sudo apt install xfce4-terminal is a simple option.

Building and Installing

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
cmake --build .

Installing

sudo cmake --build . -- install

Now you can run with miriway, or select "Miriway" from the login screen.

Keyboard shortcuts using `Meta` and `Ctrl-Alt` can be added or amended

These shortcuts are the defaults provided:

Modifiers	Key	Function	Action
Ctrl-Alt	T	miriway-terminal	Terminal emulator
meta	Left	@dock-left	Dock app left
meta	Right	@dock-right	Dock app right
meta	Space	@toggle-maximized	Toggle app maximized
meta	Home	@workspace-begin	First workspace ("Shift" to bring app)
meta	End	@workspace-end	Last workspace ("Shift" to bring app)
meta	Page_Up	@workspace-up	Previous workspace ("Shift" to bring app)
meta	Page_Down	@workspace-down	Next workspace ("Shift" to bring app)
ctrl-alt	BackSpace	@exit	Exit ("Shift" to force if apps are open)

These (and other) defaults are specified in (/usr/local/etc/xdg/xdg-miriway/miriway-shell.config but can be overridden in ~/.config/miriway-shell.config. You should typically copy and edit the default config file. It provides some examples using components from existing desktop environments. (And the corresponding apt install commands)

The "@" commands are internal to miriway-shell, others are commands that could be executed from a terminal.

Example configurations

I've provided an example-configs subdirectory to hold scripts to set up example configurations.

In particular, I've added example-configs/miriway-config-alan_g.bash which sets up some options I've been trying. The script works fine on Ubuntu 23.04, but isn't portable (it uses apt and assumes packages are in the archive). If you have an alternative configuration, please share!

mikekasprzak/Miriway