Weston

Weston is the reference implementation of a Wayland compositor.

Installation

Usage

To launch Weston natively (from a TTY) or to run Weston inside a running X session:

$ weston

See weston(1) for details and configuration flags.

Demo applications

Then within Weston, you can run the demos. To launch a terminal emulator:

$ weston-terminal

To move flowers around the screen:

$ weston-flower

To display images:

$ weston-image image1.jpg image2.jpg...

Shortcuts

Tip: Super (windows key) can be changed, see weston.ini

**Keyboard Shortcuts**
Command	Action
`Ctrl+Alt+Backspace`	Quit Weston
`Super+Scroll` (or `PageUp`/`PageDown`)	Zoom in/out of desktop
`Super+Tab`	Switch windows
`Super+LMB`	Move Window
	Rotate Window
`Super+RMB`	Resize Window
	Change window opacity
	Force Kill Active Window
	Switch Prev/Next Workspace
	Grab Current Window and Switch Workspace
`Super+Fn`	Switch to Workspace n (e.g. F2)
	Take a screenshot
	Record a screencast

Configuration

Following is an example configuration file. See for more.

Minimal :

Monitors

Weston's outputs differ slightly from those of Monitors:

$ ls /sys/class/drm

card0
card0-VGA-1
card1
card1-DVI-I-1
card1-HDMI-A-1
card1-VGA-2

is the unused built-in video adapter. The add-on adapter  is cabled to one HDMI and one DVI monitor, so the output names are HDMI-A-1 and .

XWayland

See Wayland#XWayland for details and an overview of available packages.

Set the following to activate the use of XWayland:

High DPI displays

For Retina or HiDPI displays, use:

Shell font

Weston uses the default sans-serif font for window title bars, clocks, etc. See Font configuration#Set default or fallback fonts for instructions on how to change this font.

Tips and tricks

Screencast recording

Weston has built-in screencast recording which can be started and stopped by pressing the + key combination. Screencasts are saved to the file in the current working directory of Weston. The WCAP format is a lossless video format specific to Weston, which only records the difference in frames. To be able to play the recorded screencast, the WCAP file will need to be converted to a format which a media player can understand. First, convert the capture to the YUV pixel format:

$ wcap-decode --yuv4mpeg2 capture.wcap > capture.y4m

The YUV file can then be transcoded to other formats using FFmpeg or (see x264 -h for more).

Window switching

To switch windows with instead of Super+Tab change to KEY_SPACE in and recompile weston.

EGLstream support (for proprietary Nvidia Driver)

See Wayland#Requirements for reference.

You can find weston-eglstream packages on AUR, that contain special patches.