Cage-Present: Do multimedia presentations the Unix way!

Cage-Present is a wlroots-based Wayland compositor for Linux. It is a tweaked version of the Cage compositor by Jente Hidskes, which is itself based on the annotated source of tinywl and rootston by the authors of Sway, so most of the credit should go to these people. Cage-Present lets you show off multimedia presentations that are backed by all the native software on your computer.

What does Cage-Present do?

The Problem:

You want to give a presentation that includes all sorts of multimedia, like regular pdfs, but also videos, sounds, the whole shebang.

Solution A:

• Spend millions creating a proprietary presentation document format and editor that can embed and display a zillion different types of media.

Solution B:

• Let your OS's already existing document and media viewers do all the work, and wrap the result up in a single maximisable window as a Wayland compositor.

How to use

Suppose you want to present something that consists of a multi-page beamer pdf, and an mp4 video, before jumping into an interactive terminal session. To do that, just write a simple script:

cmds.sh:

xdg-open slides.pdf
xdg-open video.mp4
$TERMINAL

Then just run cage-present cmds.sh, and cage-present will spawn a new Wayland compositor with slides.pdf maximised inside. You can then advance from the slides to diagram.pdf by pressing ALT+Right (by default). Press ALT+Escape to exit the compositor. The compositor will automatically exit after advancing past the final command.

The real power of a modular, agnostic approach like this is that you can leverage all of the software on your computer to display any media format at your disposal, without having to wait for someone like Microsoft to decide that it's a good idea. You can even seamlessly transition into any kind of interactive demonstration without having to manually un-fullscreen the presentation and open another window. Of course, the obvious caveat of running arbitrary software is that the only safe option is to run your own presentations on your own computer.

Building

Dependencies: wayland, wlroots, xkbcommon

Building requires the meson build system

$ meson build

$ ninja -C build

To run Xorg applications inside Cage-Present, use the command meson build --Dxwayland=true, and have a version of wlroots with xwayland support.

Run with ./build/cage-present path/to/cmds.sh