Wayland support

[vith]

Wayland is now the default display server on some popular distros such as Fedora 25.

It would be great if ActivityWatch worked on Wayland!

On v0.7.0b1 I just get this log line repeatedly:

2017-08-02 09:35:59,457 [WARNING]: Failed to find active window, id found was 0x0 (aw_watcher_window.lib:19)

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[ErikBjare]

I've been anticipating this... See this issue: ActivityWatch/aw-watcher-window#18

Unfortunately, I'm not sure how to solve this. It seems like we can't have Wayland-support since Wayland itself doesn't have any notion of active window.

Are you using Gnome? I'd be interested in getting this working on Gnome or some other large desktop environment with Wayland support to start with and then see how we should go from there.

Edit: It seems Gnome is deprecating their get_active_window API which only ever worked on X11. Will investigate further.

Edit 2: Done quite a few searches but have come up emptyhanded. Considering asking a question on Stack Exchange and/or sending a mail to some Gnome mailinglist.

[vith]

Ah, that does complicate things.

Yep, I'm using Gnome on Arch Linux actually. ActivityWatch is the only thing keeping me using the Gnome on Xorg session.

[ErikBjare]

Created a question on Stack Overflow, will try to find someone on IRC to help.

Edit: Also asked on the Gnome IRC, seems a bit quiet right now.

Edit: Has now been ~20h since I asked, no one replied to me in that channel. Might want to try a mailinglist further down the line.

[ErikBjare]

Alright, just asked in the #wayland channel on Freenode. Got a response at least, but the situation seems pretty bad.

15:20:44  ErikBjare    Hello everybody. I'm working on a piece of self-tracking software called ActivityWatch (https://github.com/ActivityWatch/activitywatch). I know this isn't exactly the right place to ask, but I was wondering if anyone knew anything about getting the active window in any Wayland-using DE.
15:20:57  ErikBjare    Created a question on SO: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45465016/how-do-i-get-the-active-window-on-gnome-wayland
15:21:25  ErikBjare    Here's the issue in my repo for it: https://github.com/ActivityWatch/activitywatch/issues/92
15:22:54  ErikBjare    There are a bunch of other applications that depend on it (RescueTime, selfspy, arbtt, ulogme, etc.) so they'd need it as well
15:24:23  blocage      ErikBjare, in the core protocol you cannot know which windnow has the keyboard or cursor focus
15:24:39  blocage      ErikBjare, in the wayland core protocol *
15:25:10  blocage      ErikBjare, you can just know if your window has the focus or not, it a design choise
15:25:23  blocage      avoid client spying each other
15:25:25  ErikBjare    blocage: I'm aware, that's my reason for concern. I'm not saying it should be included or anything, but as it looks now every DE would need to implement it themselves if these kind of applications are to be supported
15:25:46  ErikBjare    So wondering if anyone knew the teams working with Wayland on Gnome for example
15:26:11  ErikBjare    But thanks for confirming
15:26:29  blocage      ErikBjare, DE should create a custom extension, or use D-bus or other IPC
15:27:31  blocage      ErikBjare, I guess some compositor are around here, but I do not know myself if there is such extension already
15:27:44  blocage      compositor developers *
15:28:36  ErikBjare    I don't think there is (I've done quite a bit of searching), so I guess I need to catch the attention of some DE developers
15:29:16  ErikBjare    Thanks a lot though
15:29:42  ErikBjare    blocage: Would you mind if I shared logs of our conversation in the issue?                                     
15:30:05  blocage      just use it :) it's public                                                                                               
15:30:19  ErikBjare    ty :)                                                                                                            

I guess our only option is to contact some DE developers and petition them to create a way to get the info.

[osule]

You may be able to get the active window from the root window.

• https://github.com/wayland-project/weston/blob/master/xwayland/window-manager.c#L2244
• https://developer.gnome.org/gdk3/stable/GdkScreen.html#gdk-screen-get-active-window

[ErikBjare]

@osule Unfortunately that won't work. That Gnome API is X11 only (that's why its deprecated) and that thing you found in weston is just xwayland.

Wayland has no concept of active window, and Gnome has no internal concept of it that it exposes. The reasons for this seems to be privacy as blocage mentioned in the IRC convo I pasted.

[ErikBjare]

Filed an issue on the bug tracker for Gnome's mutter.

[Awerick]

Hi @ErikBjare, I stumbled upon this issue while searching for a related problem.

Excuse me, in case this is completely off track but I just came across the "Wayland Security Module" ("WSM", see below for links) and thought, this might be interesting / relevant for this issue as well:
Its a proposal for a standardized, secure way to let programs perform "sensitive" tasks under Wayland (if the Desktop Environments/Wayland compositors would support the WSM).
Maybe long-term this could also be a solution for this issue of "getting the active window under Wayland".

More info on Wayland Security Module:
X.Org Presentation 2014 ; official GitHub repo ; Wikipedia: Wayland#WSM

[ErikBjare]

@Awerick Thanks a lot for reaching out!

WSM looks like a great initiative, and I had no idea it existed. It's probably the closest thing to a solution I've seen so far. Let's hope there is interest in it from the Wayland community, I might try prodding them in the future and see if they have considered our usecase 🙂