Ulubis

Ulubis is a Wayland compositor written in Common Lisp. It is inspired by FVWM and StumpWM. The idea is that it is easy to hack on, customise, define your own interaction modes, etc. (see alt-tab-mode.lisp as an example of defining a custom mode)

(I currently call it a compositor intentionally...let's get a bit more window management functionality in before calling it a WM)

Installation of ulubis

• Ensure you have SBCL or CCL and Quicklisp installed.
• Download the latest release
• Unzip the archive
• cd ulubis-release-vX.X
• sh build-ulubis.sh (or sh build-ulubis-sdl.sh) to build with SBCL as default or
• sh build-ulubis.sh ccl (or sh build-ulubis-sdl.sh ccl) to build with CCL for example

This will generate the ulubis (or ulubis-sdl if ulubis-build-sdl.sh is used) executable in the build/ directory.

Running ulubis

To run ulubis the user must be a member of the input and video groups. Navigate to a virtual terminal and run

> ulubis

For the SDL2 backend simply run ulubis-sdl when in X.

Configuration

Ulubis looks for the file ~/.ulubis.lisp and loads it if it exists.

An example configuration is as follows:

(in-package :ulubis)

(if (string-equal (symbol-name ulubis-backend:backend-name) "backend-drm-gbm")
    (progn
      (setf (screen-width *compositor*) 1440)
      (setf (screen-height *compositor*) 900))
    (progn
      (setf (screen-width *compositor*) 900)
      (setf (screen-height *compositor*) 600)))

(set-keymap *compositor* "evdev" "apple" "gb" "" "")

(defun startup ()
  (swank-loader:init)
  (swank:create-server :port 4005 :style :spawn :dont-close t)
  (swank:set-package "ULUBIS")

  ;; Add 4 views (virtual desktops) using the desktop-mode as default
  (loop :for i :from 0 :to 3 :do (push-view 'desktop-mode))
  (setf (current-view *compositor*) (first (views *compositor*))))

Status

Ulubis is known to work with sbcl and ccl. I have only tested it on two machines which Intel graphics chips, please get in touch if it does / doesn't work with Nvidia or AMD cards. It is very alpha.

Roadmap

The vague roadmap for ulubis is as follows (not necessarily in order):

• Wallpapers
• Add (an at least rudimentary) menu system
• Server-side decorations
• Add screen locking
• Add screenshooting and video capture
• Support multiple monitors
• Support more (most?) Wayland clients
• XWayland support
• Potentially define custom Wayland protocols for ulubis (maybe you want to replace a built-in menu with your own menu written in QML)

Dependencies

Ulubis depends on:

• libwayland
• cl-wayland
• libxkbcommon
• cl-xkb
• cepl
• vydd's easing library
• osicat
• trivial-dump-core
• trivial-backtrace

Ulubis has two backends: ulubis-sdl (an SDL2 backend) and ulubis-drm-gbm (a DRM/GBM backend). The DRM/GBM backend is intended to be the backend whilst the SDL2 is intended for testing on X.

The DRM/GBM backend depends on:

• libdrm
• libgbm
• libEGL
• cl-drm
• cl-gbm
• cl-egl
• cepl.drm-gbm
• cl-libinput

The dependencies for the SDL2 backend are:

• SDL2
• cepl.sdl2