Is anyone using sway?

I was looking for dwm in wayland, there is dwl but not in Trisquel repository. It may not be difficult to compile, but since there is sway available that is also doing automatic tiling, I decided to give it a try.

For me, using an azerty keyboard, sway isn't usable with the default configuration, I needed to copy /etc/sway/config to ~/.config/sway/config and edit it to add:

input * {
    xkb_layout "fr"
}

and to change the keyboard shortcuts for workspaces:

    # Switch to workspace
    bindsym $mod+ampersand  workspace number 1
    bindsym $mod+eacute     workspace number 2
    bindsym $mod+quotedbl   workspace number 3
    bindsym $mod+apostrophe workspace number 4
    bindsym $mod+parenleft  workspace number 5
    bindsym $mod+minus      workspace number 6
    bindsym $mod+egrave     workspace number 7
    bindsym $mod+underscore workspace number 8
    bindsym $mod+ccedilla    workspace number 9
    bindsym $mod+agrave     workspace number 10
    # Move focused container to workspace
    bindsym $mod+1 move container to workspace number 1
    bindsym $mod+2 move container to workspace number 2
    bindsym $mod+3 move container to workspace number 3
    bindsym $mod+4 move container to workspace number 4
    bindsym $mod+5 move container to workspace number 5
    bindsym $mod+6 move container to workspace number 6
    bindsym $mod+7 move container to workspace number 7
    bindsym $mod+8 move container to workspace number 8
    bindsym $mod+9 move container to workspace number 9
    bindsym $mod+0 move container to workspace number 10

I took that opportunity to also change some shortcuts to be like dwm (like for dmenu).

I installed foot, which is the default terminal used by sway. Also, to set fonts, I added:

set $gnome-schema org.gnome.desktop.interface

exec_always {

    gsettings set $gnome-schema font-name 'Sans 12'
}

Then, it somehow works, there is a system tray.

Of course, there is nothing like a "control centre", so one needs to find relevant programs to adjust settings.

The ones I found in Trisquel repositories:

• wdisplays: to set screen resolutions (there is also wlr-randr in command line)
• gammastep: almost like redshift, but for wlroots-based wayland compositors, sway is one of them.

I tried waybar, which is a replacement for swaybar, the native bar of sway. It looks a lot more powerful but also more work to configure. If I don't find what I need with swaybar, I may try it.

I would happily use any DE that natively supports automatic tiling, but it seems none do that, and their tiling extensions somehow get broken at some point.

Even though it is a bit of a hassle not to use a ready to use a DE, I get the feeling that enough people use sway so that there is a good solution for everything, so perhaps people who want automatic tiling just use sway and the easiest for me is to do the same.

As compared with dwm:

• I am missing the main/stack behaviour
• sway has workspaces instead of tags (the same window can have more than one tags), but I always used a single tag for each window, so it does not really matter to me.