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:

miriway-terminal

miriway

miriway-shell.config

miriway.desktop

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

Keys	Action
Ctrl-Alt-BkSp	Exit (long press to force if apps are open)
Meta-Left	Dock left
Meta-Right	Dock right
Meta-PgUp	Previous workspace
Meta-Shift-PgUp	Move window to previous workspace
Meta-PgDn	Next workspace
Meta-Shift-PgDn	Move window to next workspace
Meta-Home	First workspace
Meta-Shift-Home	Move window to first workspace
Meta-End	Last workspace
Meta-Shift-End	Move window to last workspace

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

These (and other) defaults are specified in /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)

Keys	Action
Ctrl-Alt-T	Terminal emulator

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!