Displaying pop-ups as floating windows.

[fredefox]

$ lsmod | grep nvidia | wc -l
0

I hope I am welcome :S

$ swaymsg -t get_version
sway version 1.0-alpha.6-335-ga41b77ef (Oct 20 2018, branch 'master')

This is a feature request so I will forego the other formalities you asked for. In i3 some windows are opened as pop-ups. That is to say, they are openened in the "floating" mode. I am not aware how this works technically I also don't know if it works for some programs under sway. It does not work with zenity.

Minimal repro:

$ zenity --question

Desired behaviour: A small floating window is opened.

Actual behaviour: A new tiled window is displayed.

Is this something that you have support for that may be a problem with my installation? I recently build this from source, so I may have messed something up. Floating windows do work for me though.

[emersion]

In i3 zenity uses X11, which sets the window as a dialog window. In sway it uses Wayland which has no "window type". So we can't do anything about it.

Note that if zenity was making the window non-resizable, we would make it floating.

[emersion]

You could probably use criteria to make zenity windows floating by default.

[fredefox]

Thanks for the clarification! So Wayland has nothing similar to "window type"? Seems like a huge design oversight to me...

[emersion]

Window types are essentially useless. It's pretty uncommon to have dialog windows without a parent. In this particular case I think zenity should make its dialog non-resizable.

[fredefox]

I see. Thank you!

[ascent12]

So Wayland has nothing similar to "window type"?

Wayland has shells, which is "kind-of" like a window type, but not really the same thing in an X11 sense.

[b0o]

Window types are essentially useless. It's pretty uncommon to have dialog windows without a parent. In this particular case I think zenity should make its dialog non-resizable.

So, it seems nearly impossible to float a pop-up window created by Chrome or Firefox when either app is using its Wayland backend.

I came up with a super hacky workaround - a userscript that tries to detect pop-up windows based on the window.titlebar.visible or window.menubar.visible properties, and if either one is false I prepend a well-known string to the window title. I check for this string inside my Sway config and float matching windows. But, let's be honest: 🤮. Is there really no better way?

[fuzunspm]

could you find a better way?

[celebilercem]

I installed mako and it works fine with Sway and Firefox.

[jpetazzo]

Just to clarify (in case someone else stumbles upon this): after installing mako, you probably need to restart Firefox. There may or may not be other steps to do (I fiddled around with makoctl, made sure mako was running, upgraded libnotify... And it's finally when I restarted Firefox that notifications worked correctly!)

I suppose that Firefox checks if there is a notification service registered on D-BUS.

• If there is one, it will use it (and display neat little desktop notifications).
• If there is none, it will fallback to display notifications directly, but it does so in a hackish way (which is why we end up with these nasty windows that required ugly hacks).

I suppose (but your guess is as good as mine!) that Firefox checks once on start-up if there is a notification service available (and that it's why I had to restart Firefox for things to start working).

[icy-comet]

Sorry, to comment on such an old issue.

However, Zenity dialogues were indeed marked as non-resizable with this commit and the windows now open in floating mode by default.

Just putting this here for google :)