We’ve accumulated enough features and fixes that it is time for yet another release. The beefier changelogs can be found here: (Arcan) and here: (Durden). Starting with the following video which consolidates the visible changes to (indirectly) Arcan and its reference desktop environment, Durden.

Among the many release highlights is the improved OpenBSD support and that we are now packaged in void linux (wiki entry), the premier Linux distribution for those of us who would much prefer a user space free of the more incessant “freedesktop.org” impositions. With the exception of the recently added ‘Safespaces‘ VR desktop project, and its associated hardware device driver bridges, most other key components and supplementary tools are now packaged and ready to be enjoyed inside the void. The Arcan package has been synched to match 0.5.5 and Durden 0.5 will come in a day or two.

In terms of future steps:

The Arcan 0.5 focus with its focus on graphics related subsystems will likely wind down towards the end of the year and put more attention towards advanced network support (that is, not RDP/VNC nonsense), being the key part we lack before comfortably being able to claim to be way beyond feature parity with Xorg.

Durden has about one or two big release more with a feature focus in it (particularly for touch displays, tablets and styluses), then we will switch over to improving the ones we already have and polish away the ‘developer graphics’ aesthetics and just sand down the edges in general.

After this release, the respective git repositories will be managed a bit differently from the ‘everything goes on master’ approach from before. After each ‘big’ release such as this one, a set of key features per subsystem gets picked from ‘the infinitely big pile’ and gets added as a branch with a corresponding (VERSION-SUBSYS-NOTES) file in the root covering a rough breakdown of the changes to be made before the branch is complete.

When a branch has been completed, it gets cleaned up, rebased, squashed and merged unto master – prompting a new version bump (a.b.c.d+1) until there are no more such branches, prompting a new blog post /video and a (a.b.c+1) versioned release.

Thus, if you are monitoring the git – be forewarned that activity on master will only come in bursts and that the topic branches will be the new way to go.

You can see the current ones here: ARCAN and DURDEN. Now, onto the highlighted feature walkthrough.

Browser Improvement: Video Previews

The built-in command-line interface resource browser has been extended with the option to allow known video formats to be automatically previewed when selected or when they pop into view. More detailed controls over preview triggers have also been added.

Relevant menu paths: /global/settings/browser

The next steps for this feature is to add ‘set actions’ for the filtered set, like open as playlist. We are also investigating letting external clients provide previews (based on priority and level of trust), as well as open to client, letting the browser act as a universal file picker.

New Feature: Menu system is mountable

All UI interaction and configuration can now be accessed ‘as a file’. Combined with the added ‘arcan_cfgfs’ (arcan:src/tools/acfgfs) FUSE file system tool, the entire menu system is now mountable – albeit  still a bit slow:

This opens up for a number of testing / automation features, and should also make it easier to discover all the available features when you can basically find and grep. It is implemented over the ‘control’ domain socket. Enable it with the the menu path:

/global/settings/system/control=i_am_in_control

and a socket with the name ‘i_am_in_control’ will be created in the durden/ipc path in the appl_temp filesystem namespace (depending on how you run it, for a local build it might be the same as /path/to/durden, $XDG_DATA_HOME/arcan/appl-out/durden/ipc or $HOME/.arcan/appl-out/durden/ipc on some distributions). You can also access the socket manually or via other/custom tools (fastest approach) than FUSE:

socat - unix-client:/path/to/i_am_in_control

Here you should be able to issue commands like:

 ls /
read /global/settings/visual/mouse_scale
exec /browse
write /global/settings/visual/mouse_scale=2

This also opens up for runtime conversion / application of configuration files from other WM systems, assisting with workflow migration.

It is also possible to monitor events from various desktop subsystems:

monitor wm notification display timers

(current groups being ‘notification’, ‘wm’, ‘display’, ‘connection’, ‘input’, ‘dispatch’, ‘wayland’, ‘ipc’, ‘timers’, ‘clipboard’, ‘clients’)

Combining the monitor feature with the ‘everything is a file’ approach should be complete enough to allow the conversion of old xdotool- like hacks, or, being brave enough, translate the relevant xlib subsets to provide support for running Xorg WMs.

New Tool: VRViewer

It is no coincidence that this tool looks eerily similar to the VR Desktop (Safespaces) – it is mostly the exact same code base, with small parts changed to integrate into the desktop.

The primary uses for this tool are both for developing and testing safespaces without having to enable/disable a HMD every so often, but also for data viewing use cases where you might have stereoscopic and/or geometry projected videos or photos that you want to look at quickly.

Relevant menu paths: /global/tools/vrviewer

The video also shows “drag-and-drop” like cursor-tagging, integrated into the tool to allow windows to migrate or clone into the VR tool.

Advanced Float improvements:

The ‘advanced float’ mode is something of a more hidden tool that slowly but surely aggregates all the features that your rodent friendly DE would provide. Two new features this time: a reveal / hide mode to the autolayouter, and a Window-to-Wallpaper feature that can forward input when no native window has input focus. Below, you can see an instance of Xarcan being used as the ‘wallpaper’. The gridfit- tool that allows compiz- like pseudo-tiling has also received a popup- mode for a pointer device friendly quickpath.

Relevant menu paths: /target/window/workspace_background

The final coming stretch for this part of Durden should be binding menu paths to background icons, and allow window minimization targets to be statusbar, tray or desktop.

New Feature: Decoration Impostors

As a follow up to the argument on client side decorations, we now allow per-client custom cropping of [t | l | d | r] pixels, and the option to define a titlebar impostor that can be toggled on and off. In the video you see gtk3-demo under wayland getting its incessant border and shadow removed, and the “fattyfingerbar” becoming a custom toggle in order to not lose access to client controls. There are still a number of edge cases to work out, but the basic concept is working.

Relevant menu paths: /target/window/crop, /target/window/titlebar/impostor

Speaking of decorations, it is now possible to bind arbitrary menu paths to titlebar buttons in UI (previous method was only by patching autostart.lua and worked globally), with unique per window overrides or mode-specific sets that follow the current workspace layout mode. Workspaces in float mode can also have a different border thickness and border area than the other modes.

The next steps for this feature is automatic detection, integration with the ‘viewport’ protocol, to allow the selected window titlebar to ‘merge’ into the statusbar center-area, to relayout it to be attached to the sides of the window, and to provide an ‘external impostor’ for the statusbar (which is just a special version of the titlebar, same UI code) via a connection point.

New Widget – notifications:

When various subsystems or clients have anything important to say, the message is added to a queue that will be flushed whenever the HUD is interactively toggled. This also occurs on certain important events, like the error triggering crash recovery or abnormal client termination. You can also attach notifications of your own via the IPC system mentioned earlier.

Relevant menu paths: /global/settings/notifications/* (with send=… to emit)

The video clip showed a test client that shows a single colour window for a brief moment, then shuts down due to some “problem” but just before the connection is severed, the client can attach a short ‘last_words’ message to provide a user-readable message explaining why it terminated abnormally. This is added as a notification.

Think of it as the UI friendly equivalent of program exit codes. Since crash recovery in the WM side has gotten seamless enough that you often don’t even notice it happened, the message also carries over as a notification which is also shown in the video.