swaywm-alttab

A tool which brings familiar Alt-Tab shortcut from stacking window managers (used in Windows, Mac, KDE, GNOME, etc.) to Sway WM workspaces on Linux

Installation

Install a binary crate with cargo: cargo install --git https://github.com/ar7eniyan/swaywm-alttab The swaywm-alttab binary is going to be in ~/.cargo/bin, add it to PATH if needed

TODO: make an AUR package.

Configuration

To use this program, you'll need to find the input device file for your keyboard. Input device files are placed by the Linux kernel in /dev/input/eventN. There are some tools to show the available input devices: for example evtest or libinput debug-events. Without using any third-party software, the names and other attributes of input devices can be found by cat /proc/bus/input/devices.

Seting up the permissions for keyboard input/output to work

In order for swaywm-alttab to properly access input devices and uinput kernel device as an unpriviliged user, the following steps should be made: - Create udev rules for /dev/input/ and /dev/uinput: - /etc/udev/rules.d/72-swaywm-alttab-input.rules: KERNEL=="uinput", MODE="0660", TAG+="uaccess" SUBSYSTEM=="input", MODE="0660", TAG+="uaccess" TODO: does this put a security risk on a system? - Make uinput kernel module to load on boot (doesn't load automatically at least on Arch): - /etc/modules-load.d/uinput.conf: uinput - Reboot or run the following: # Reload udev rules sudo udevadm trigger sudo udevadm control --reload # Load uinput kernel module sudo modprobe uinput

Usage

After you found the /dev/input/eventN path for your keyboard and set up the permissions, start the tool in a terminal to check if everything works correctly. Pass the input device path as an argument, replacing N with yout actual device number: ~/.cargo/bin/swaywm-alttab /dev/input/eventN Focus on different workspaces for the tool to start keeping track of them, and press Alt-Tab shortcut to see if it works.

To run swaywm-alttab on sway startup, add the following line to ~/.config/sway/config: exec ~/.cargo/bin/swaywm-alttab /dev/input/eventN

Debugging

To enable logging, set environment variable RUSTLOG to one of these values: error, warn, info, debug, trace. The default log level is info. For more complex selectors, see envlogger's documentation.

Further development

• Find a more convinient way to switch workspaces (ideally, by their con_id)
• Make a key combination configurable
• Implement input device autodetection if it's possible
• Add workspace overview UI like in sov

License: GNU GPLv3, see COPYING

``` Copyright (C) 2023 Arseniy Kuznetsov

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/. ```