Monday, December 8, 2008

Wayland gets a terminal

Still hacking on the Wayland project. I've spent some time getting the repaint loop and repaint notifications right, which is surprisingly tricky if you want to sync to vblank and make sure every client gets a chance to paint every frame. But I think I got it right and it looks beautiful when everything is synced to vblank and animating every frame. I've started looking into getting a fullscreen X server running under Wayland, which should be a matter of just passing the front buffer handle to Wayland instead of setting the mode. So far though, it's only crashing or locking up, so I wrote a terminal for Wayland as a small diversion

This is not a long term solution though, it has very limited ANSI support and I don't expect to extend it much (maybe enough to run emacs and irssi). The plan is to add a Wayland backend to GTK+, which should be a lot easier when Alex's client-side window work lands, and then just use VTE. For now, this goes a long way and the resizing is smooooth...

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Slick stuff as always, Kristian! I hope to find a free slot this week to try it on my intel-based laptop!

Unknown said...

"... it has very limited ANSI support and I don't expect to extend it much .."

Didn't a certain Finn say something to that effect on a certain mailing list back in '91? ;)

Ethan Anderson said...

Rock on!

Carl, he was talking about this terminal application, and he's probably right. Wayland, however, is what we're all hoping will replace Xorg in time..

Unknown said...

That's just great, and Wayland seems to be a great project.

I think you should "buzz" even more around Wayland, it really seems to deserve it ; what about a little "youtubed" video of it running ? :-)

Jengu said...

I've never fully understood the problem with slow resizing. Can you explain how/why Wayland allows smooth resizing compared to before?

Syntropy said...

Very well done! Keep up the great work.