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# Emacs should become a Wayland compositor
Michael Bauer[[!sidebar content=""]]
 (IRC: permcu, <mailto:perma-curious@posteo.de>)

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Since Emacs learned wayland last year, it can now become a wayland compositor.
Emacs is already a great window manager. Let us embrace this in the wayland
future, where managers become compositors.

In this short talk I would like to convince you that this is a good idea and get
you exciting about the possibilities. I then outline how to go about
implementing this idea.

Afterwards I would very much like to get a discussion started together.

Discussions:

- <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33849556>

# Discussion

## Notes

-   Call to action - let Michael know if you know anyone else working on
    something like this so they can collaborate and not duplicate
    effort.
-   Site (coming soon): perma-curious.eu
- I am an EXWM user and would be very happy to test your code! Looks great!  
- I know of many people quitting EXWM because of the lack of active development. Your project could be a kind of revival!  
- I would be interested to try it out. I'm on sway right now.  
- What I mean is that people are moving to other WMs which work or are planned to work with Wayland 
- sway.el might have something that could be used  
- Feedback:
  - Thank you very much for the talk and the work.  
  - Thank you for sharing your amazing work!  
  - Yes, thank you for the talk, looks really promising  
  - thank you for the talk 
  - Thanks and great job!  
  
## Questions and answers

-   Q: Are you using it as a replacement of EXWM?
    -   A: No, not yet, but I'm planning to.
-   Q:Is this testable?
    -   A:
-   Q: Have you considered contributing it to emacs core? 
    -   A:
-   Q:Question: this is wayland compositor in Emacs? What different with
    XReprarent in X11 ?
    -   A:No, I planned it, but no. Does not handle file descriptors.
        It's a compositor that talks to Emacs. etc. I don't know what
        XReparent is; have to skip that.
-   Q:What does it mean for emacs to be "a wayland compositor"? What
    can the end users do with it?
    -   A:
-   Q: How would multiple monitors be handled? Separate Frames?
    -   A:
-   Q:  Could you make it so you can restart emacs without loging out;
    or switch to non emacs buffers while emacs is blocking: these are
    the biggest issues with EXWM? Maybe in the future with a different
    ui for non emacs buffers.
    -   A: 
-   Q:Did this project can implement *mirror* of buffer for Emacs
    different window?
    -   A:
-   Q:How does the single-threaded affects the project?
    -   A:
-   Q:this technology need write wayland server? Can it works with
    Gnome3 ?
    -   A:
-   Q: Could there be a emacs-wayland-server and just connect with
    emacsclient?
    -   A:
-   Q: When you share your code, could you provide the equivalent of an
    .xsession script for those who are on EXWM and want to test?
    -   A:
-   Q: there have a demo to show this emacs-wayland-compositor, even it
    buggy now? Just curious. ;)
    -   A:
    -   Q: So the current limitation is that buffer mirroring doesn't
        respect different widths/heights?
    -   A:(answered - transcript tbd)
-   Q:Could you use some of this package with other walyand compositers
    "probably not all of it" , sway, kde, river, gnome.
    -   A:(answered - transcript tbd)
-   Q:Will Wayland support reach feature parity with EXWM in the future?
    Will there be other tradeoffs?
    -   A:(answered - transcript tbd)
-   Q: What is the biggest difference between Xorg and wayland that you
    have found?
    -   A:(answered - transcript tbd)
-   Q: Did you know EAF
    <https://github.com/emacs-eaf/emacs-application-framework> ? 
- Do you have the code available somewhere (git repo)?  
  - perma-curious.eu  


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