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Add Wayland Support #55
Description
First of thanks a lot for making this app available for Linux. It only supports X11/xorg. Do you have any plan to support it under wayland in future? Are their in any difficulties to support it under wayland?
Again, thanks for the app.
Edit: progress:
- KDE Plasma ✅
- GNOME ❌
- Others ❌
Activity
Merrit commentedon Oct 5, 2021
Most of what we rely on to interact with the system for things like hotkeys, checking for open windows, etc only currently exists for X11.
Wayland support might be workable, but it would require looking up / figuring out solutions for these things from scratch.
This is something I'd like to do as Wayland seems to be the way of the future, however I have limited time to work on Nyrna so I can't say currently when that would happen.
[-][Support] Wayland Support[/-][+]Add Wayland Support[/+]Hikandy commentedon Feb 7, 2022
Any progress on this? This seems like a great app but on window managers such as sway, this seems not to work at all
Merrit commentedon Feb 7, 2022
Not as yet, I've been quite busy.
I would be happy to consider a pull request if someone wanted to look into this, otherwise it will be when I have some free time.
Merrit commentedon Mar 18, 2022
I've done some more research and it looks like the things we need (list open windows, names, processes, etc) don't exist for Wayland still - though some proposals for such things are in draft stages.
Northcode commentedon Feb 8, 2023
FWIW, for sway specifically, I've reimplemented the same functionality with some bash scripts:
https://github.com/Northcode/dotfiles/blob/master/sway/bin/get-focused-pid
https://github.com/Northcode/dotfiles/blob/master/sway/bin/toggle-psuspend
They require ps, pstree, grep and jq to work
you can bind it to a key like
$mod+pausein your config with:bindsym $mod+pause exec toggle-psuspend $(get-focused-pid)Merrit commentedon Jul 6, 2023
For reference, this is the issue where this functionality is being discussed:
flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal#304
Progress seems to have stalled for the time being, unfortunately.
lnee94 commentedon Nov 1, 2023
Well you could get the input directly from /dev/input. evtest a nice command to start with, but this would require root.
Or you could take advantage of most DE having custom shortcuts which can run commands and at least for KDE you can import them. If a dbus endpoint was exposed to emulate the short cuts I could do the rest
Rabcor commentedon Feb 28, 2024
Well, being able to pause windows by PID or something would come a long way, since it would mean we could pause windows from commandline.
Right now the Nyrna GUI does seem to be working in wayland (at least on Hyprland), however the problem is that the pause button doesn't work, it's because wayland is designed so that no application is supposed to be able to read the inputs to another application.
But it is possible to bypass this issue by just setting a global shortcut in your compositor, however
nyrna --toggledoes not work because it cannot detect the current window, so I need to go into nyrna's gui to pause anything with it.Being able to pause a specific application or window from the CLI would give wayland users more options until any sort of official wayland support can be added (which, I'm not holding my breath for because wayland is kinda shit when it comes to things like this, at best support for wlroots can be added for something, but universal wayland support is an impossibility)
Merrit commentedon Mar 1, 2024
Can you clarify what you mean? To my knowledge the hotkey (Pause by default) works fine in Wayland - I tested it just now:
env XDG_SESSION_TYPE=x11 katePauseDoes your experience differ?
Rabcor commentedon Mar 4, 2024
I think maybe it depends on the compositor (the inherent problem for wayland support, everything depends on the compositor and nothing is standardized...) Sounds like you're on plasma wayland, maybe they somehow set things up for it to just work.
But did you try other compositors like sway? I'm on Hyprland.
Wayland is designed so that one window is not supposed ot be able to read keyboard inputs to another window (e.g. whenever there is another window focused), if they can it means the compositor is doing something to enable it, but it seems kind of a moot point to be using wayland if you're just patching out all it's "security" features over Xorg which was the main reason stated for wayland being made, doesn't it? (This particular feature is to prevent keylogging)
The only way to resolve this issue on Hyprland is global shortcuts, where the compositor intercepts certain key presses no matter what is focused and performs an action. Which means there'd have to be a way to make nyrna suspend applications from commandline in order to actually make the keybind work for many wayland compositors.
guss77 commentedon Mar 4, 2024
As far as I can tell, Nyrna does not make use of the Global Shortcuts Wayland portal - at least kglobalaccess in my Plasma installation knows nothing about Nyrna.
I believe Nyrna uses the X11 protocol to read global shortcuts from XWayland apps, which is part of what Plasma calls "Legacy X11 App Support", and on my system it looks like this:
Which - as you can see - is off, but likely the way kwin works is that even when it is off X11 apps can still read keystrokes that are entered in other X11 apps. This actually makes a lot of sense if you know xlib.
If I use Nyrna's "application specific hotkey" to specify a key to pause Kate (when running under XWayland), that hotkey will not pause Kate when another Wayland application is active, but will pause Kate if another XWayland application is active.
I would guess that doesn't work for you in Hyprland (and possibly other wlroots friends) because they isolate X11 clients from each other. The first thing that I would check if to use
psto see how many XWayland processes you have when running Nyrna and another XWayland application - there should be only 1 that is shared between all X11 apps. If Hyprland has each X11 app run with its own XWayland instance - that could be the issue.Rabcor commentedon Mar 4, 2024
I think every xwayland application is run with the same xwayland instance, at least i don't see any duplicates.
perroboc commentedon Mar 6, 2024
Was checking updates on plasma 6, and this popped up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWWQT3HamBw
Might be worth a look to save the state of games to disk
flashgnash commentedon Sep 24, 2024
Also interested in Wayland support, haven't used x11 in almost a year now
Is it feasible to get any kind of CLI command to give a process ID, window class etc and pause/resume that?
That way hyprland/sway/etc users can setup their own keybindings in the window manager itself
Unsure how this tool works under the hood, if it depends on x11 for the actual pause/resume functionality but you mentioned not being able to get key inputs and window titles which this would sidestep at least
Merrit commentedon Sep 25, 2024
The issue is that Wayland doesn't provide any way to get information about open application windows. This won't change until this issue is resolved: flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal#304
As a workaround I have been hacking together a solution that will work specifically for KDE, though I haven't had time to finish it yet.
materemias commentedon Nov 5, 2024
@Merrit please let us know here when the KDE specific workaround is available
Merrit commentedon Nov 5, 2024
I shall :)
Been ridiculously busy both with work-stuff and personal-stuff 😵💫 but I will finish it up soon as I get a chance! 💙
riyaniii commentedon Aug 6, 2025
Although a bit hacky, i have got a gnome specific solution working🖤
Rabcor commentedon Aug 6, 2025
my workaround is to just use
kill -18to pause andkill -19to resume, keybound them to my pause key, no idea how this compares to nyrna though.Merrit commentedon Mar 22, 2026
Support for KDE Wayland was added with #240, available in v2.27.0.
Ended up being somewhat complicated to work around the lack of official APIs, but as a part of this most of the scaffolding is in place to support other DEs in a similar manner with far less work. Example:
nyrna/lib/native_platform/src/linux/active_window/active_window_wayland.dart
Lines 73 to 74 in a733084
Contributions to add support for other DEs are welcome.