wlosd 1

OSD for wayland.

wlosd

An on-screen display for Wayland compositors.

You might also be interested in wledges which provides active edges for Wayland compositors.

Supported Desktops

Tested on Sway, but should work on all Wayland compositors that support the Layer Shell protocol. More precisely, it should work on all desktops supported by gtk4-layer-shell.

Installation

Dependencies:

Debian/Ubuntu:

sudo apt install libgirepository-1.0-dev gcc libcairo2-dev pkg-config python3-dev gir1.2-gtk-4.0 libgtk4-layer-shell-dev
pip install pygobject

Fedora:

sudo dnf install gcc gobject-introspection-devel cairo-gobject-devel pkg-config python3-devel gtk4 gtk4-layer-shell-devel
pip install pygobject

Arch Linux:

sudo pacman -S python cairo pkgconf gobject-introspection gtk4 gcc gtk4-layer-shell
pip install pygobject

For other distributions, you will need:

• Python 3: instructions
• pygobject: instructions
• gtk4-layer-shell: instructions

Install wlosd:

From PyPi:

pip install wlosd

Or clone this repository.

Usage

wlosd reads commands from standard input. For example, run in a terminal:

wlosd
show --end-mark END test
Some text.
More text.
END

(don't kill the process yet)

This should display the two lines before END in the centre of the currently focused display, on top of all other windows. The text is transparent to all input events. If show is called with the --markup option, the text is interpreted as Pango markup ('<', '>' and '&' must be escaped as '<', '>', and '&'). The --css command line argument (e.g. wlosd --css style.css) can be used to pass a GTK4 style sheet (see style.css for example, and overview and properties for documentation).

To hide the text:

hide test

To see all available commands:

help

To quit:

quit

A more useful way to run wlosd would be to put something along the following lines somewhere in your startup scripts:

rm -f "${XDG_RUNTIME_DIR}/wlosdpipe"
mkfifo "${XDG_RUNTIME_DIR}/wlosdpipe"
tail -fn+1 "${XDG_RUNTIME_DIR}/wlosdpipe" | wlosd &

And send commands to wlosd like this:

printf -- 'show --end-mark END test\nSome text.\nEND\n' > "${XDG_RUNTIME_DIR}/wlosdpipe"

License

MIT, see LICENSE