State of Sway April 2017 April 29, 2017 on Drew DeVault's blog

Development on Sway continues. I thought we would have slowed down a lot more by now, but every release still comes with new features - Sway 0.12 added redshift support and binary space partitioning layouts. Sway 0.13.0 is coming soon and includes, among other things, nvidia proprietary driver support. We already have some interesting features slated for Sway 0.14.0, too!

Today Sway has 21,446 lines of C (and 4,261 lines of header files) written by 81 authors across 2,263 commits. These were written through 653 pull requests and 529 issues. Sway packages are available today in the official repos of pretty much every distribution except for Debian derivatives, and a PPA is available for those guys.

For those who are new to the project, Sway is an i3-compatible Wayland compositor. That is, your existing i3 configuration file will work as-is on Sway, and your keybindings and colors and fonts and for_window rules and so on will all be the same. It’s i3, but for Wayland, plus it’s got some bonus features. Here’s a quick rundown of what’s new since the previous state of Sway:

• Redshift support
• Improved security configuration
• Automatic binary space partitioning layouts ala AwesomeWM
• Support for more i3 window criterion
• Support for i3 marks
• xdg_shell v6 support (Wayland thing, makes more native Wayland programs work)
• We’ve switched from X.Y to X.Y.Z releases, Z releases shipping bugfixes while the next Y release is under development
• Lots of i3 compatibility improvements
• Lots of documentation improvements
• Lots of bugfixes

The new bounty program has also raised $1,200 to support Sway development! Several bounties have been awarded, including redshift support and i3 marks, but every awardee chose to redonate their reward to the bounty pool. Thanks to everyone who’s donated and everyone who’s worked on new features! Bounties have also been awarded for features in the Wayland ecosystem beyond Sway - a fact I’m especially proud of. If you want a piece of that $1,200 pot, join us on IRC and we’ll help you get started.

Many new developments are in the pipeline for you. 0.13.0 is expected to ship within the next few weeks - here’s a sneak peek at the changelog. In the future releases, development is ongoing for tray icons (encouraged by the sweet $270 bounty sitting on that feature), and several other features for 0.14.0 have been completed. We’ve also started work on a long term project to replace our compositor plumbling library, wlc, with a new one: wlroots. This should allow us to fix many of the more difficult bugs in Sway, and opens the doors for many features that weren’t previously possible. It should also give us a platform on which we can build standard protocols that other compositors can implement, unifying the Wayland platform a bit more.

Many thanks to everyone that’s contributed to sway! There’s no way Sway would have enjoyed its success without your help. That wraps things up for today, thanks for using Sway and look forward to Sway 1.0!

Note: future posts like this will omit some of the stats that were included in the previous posts. You can use the following commands to find them for yourself:

# Lines of code per author:
git ls-tree -r -z --name-only HEAD -- */*.c \
    | xargs -0 -n1 git blame --line-porcelain HEAD \
    | grep  "^author " | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr
# Commits per author:
git shortlog