Sway Fork and Hackathons - August Status Update

It’s the first week of September, the air is getting colder, and the winds are getting stronger. There’s also been some beautiful lightning storms that have lit up the sky late into the night and early hours of the morning. But back on topic, it’s time for another status update to talk about what I’ve been working on in August and what I plan to work on in the coming month.

Let’s start off with talking about Sway. It’s a wonderful Wayland compositor which I have been using for the past few months and have thoroughly enjoyed. However, it does lack some more aesthetic features like rounded borders, drop shadows, and transparent window blurring. While I personally didn’t have much interest in these features,¹ I wanted to learn some C so I took up the challenge of making customizable window borders which would allow for some of these effects.

All of this culminated in a PR to add custom border image support to Sway. While many people seem to want these new features,² the PR was ultimately closed because it doesn’t fit the vision of Sway. So, with that, my own fork of Sway was born, titled sway-borders. While the flagship feature is these borders, I plan to add on more aesthetic features and enhancements that don’t fit upstream. In the coming days, I plan on ironing out the remaining bugs³ and releasing an AUR package for my fork. If you’re interested in this release, watch this issue. Oh, and here’s my personal showcase setup which uses sway-borders:

Near the end of August, I also participated in the KuriusHacks 2020 hackathon with a few friends to create Stratus. I’ve participated in several hackathons prior, but this is my first time creating a project that ended up taking first place. Because of this, we have also began working with Kurius to create their new “hackitforward” platform based on our project which will be worked on in the coming months. I’m excited to be part of their team and hope for the best with the platform. The project is now located in their GitHub organization and will stay as an AGPL-licensed open source project.

I wish I had more to say, but I really haven’t done all that much during August — at least I’m enjoying the summer. I do, however, have some ideas of new projects I’d like to work on in September. The first, which I’ll probably title sspm is a super simple password manager that’s meant to be modular in nature and work from the command line. I’ve used Bitwarden for a while now, but it’s bloated and difficult to control with a keyboard. sspm would have a variety of backends to get the encrypted vault from and to, as well as a command line interface for interaction. The command line nature will make it easy to integrate with dynamic menus like dmenu or wofi. Just use pass…

And that’s all for now. Thanks for reading and stay tuned for my upcoming blog post about EEE.⁴