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:
- A "terminal emulator finder" script
miriway-terminal, that works with most terminal emulators; - A launch script
miriwayto simplify starting Miriway; - A default configuration file
miriway-shell.config; and, - A greeter configuration
miriway.desktopso Miriway can be selected at login
Miriway has been tested with shell components from several desktop environments
and there are notes on enabling these in miriway-shell.config.
Miriway uses the latest version of Mir available from the mir-team "release" PPA:
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:mir-team/release
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.
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.
These shortcuts are the defaults provided:
| Modifiers | Key | Function | Action |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ctrl-Alt | T | miriway-terminal | Terminal emulator |
| meta | Left | @dock-left | Dock app left |
| meta | Right | @dock-right | Dock app right |
| meta | Space | @toggle-maximized | Toggle app maximized |
| meta | Home | @workspace-begin | First workspace ("Shift" to bring app) |
| meta | End | @workspace-end | Last workspace ("Shift" to bring app) |
| meta | Page_Up | @workspace-up | Previous workspace ("Shift" to bring app) |
| meta | Page_Down | @workspace-down | Next workspace ("Shift" to bring app) |
| ctrl-alt | BackSpace | @exit | Exit ("Shift" to force if apps are open) |
These (and other) defaults are specified in (/usr/local/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)
The "@" commands are internal to miriway-shell, others are commands that could be executed from a terminal.
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!
