Native window decorations for GNOME Wayland

[DiegoMagdaleno]

Hi, im a developer, and Im interested in kitty, I was sad when I saw it doesn't support client side decorations, since im a wayland gnome user, I would love to say I have other options, but sadly with my HiDPI monitor, it looks like wayland is my only option.

I would be glad to try to get to some extent some client side decorations working, what is kitty missing to support this feature? is it possible? is the possibility of supporting this good?

Thanks! And of course thank you for your awesome software, it makes using the terminal much much better.

[kovidgoyal]

It supports client side decorations already, they are just simple white
borders without any functionality other than dragging/resizing. If you want
decorations with more functionality you would need to actually implement
it in wl_window.c. Possibly using something like libdecoration, or since
GNOME is the only window manager stupid enough to not implement server
side decorations, just directly use gtk libraries. But note that I am not
willing to have kitty require GTK as a hard dependency at either build
or run time. That means putting the code into a separate .so module that
is built only if gtk is found in setup.py via pkg-config and that is
loaded dynamically at runtime via dlopen.

[DiegoMagdaleno]

Thanks, I get into it! And yeah I respect your decision and it was actually what I had in mind!

[kovidgoyal]

Cool, all the best. Feel free to ask questions if you need clarification,
although I am no Wayland expert.

[ljrk0]

Note that there's work on adding glfw CSD support via libdecoration already:
glfw/glfw#1693

[kovidgoyal]

I looked into this and libdecoration is half baked, at best. It currently supports only a simple titlebar drawn using cairo, which is pointless since it wont be native anyway. And it hasn't even been released, ever.

If I were you I'd skip libdecoration entirely and just draw the titlebar using gtk libraries. Or better, stop using GNOME.

[DragonSWDev]

It currently supports only a simple titlebar drawn using cairo, which is pointless since it wont be native anyway

There is some work in progress to implement GTK plugin for libdecoration which should integrate with desktop pretty nicely. Even without it it's probably still better to have simple cairo titlebar than non functional or even no titlebar at all.

There is also some interest in SDL to pickup libdecoration. When it will happen libdecoration probably will be available in repositories of popular distributions.

[kovidgoyal]

Is this work happening in a public repository somewhere? And there is no need for libcairo just to draw a title. kitty already includes both harfbuzz and fontconfig/freetype that are together perfectly capable of doing simple single line text layout/rendering. In fact, I think I will just add support for rendering titles to the current empty titlebar. Should be a day or so of work.

[DragonSWDev]

There is merge request about this on libdecoration GitLab. I also tested this and it worked pretty reliably. Not perfect but gives some preview how it should work in future.

Your solution seems nice for now. libdecoration is fine (at least for me) but it's still WIP so maybe waiting for official support on GLFW side isn't bad idea.

[kovidgoyal]

In master now kitty has fully functional though non native decorations on GNOME.

[molaeiali]

After updating to 0.20.0 today on Arch Gnome 40, My window decorations are gone, is this related? Is this a feature or a bug? Is there any way to bring them back in the config?