nwg-displays

Output management utility for sway Wayland compositor, inspired by wdisplays and wlay.

This program is a part of the nwg-shell project.

nwg-displays is expected to:

• provide an intuitive GUI to manage multiple displays;
• apply settings;
• save outputs configuration to a text file;
• save workspace -> output assignments to a text file;
• support sway only.

Usage

$ nwg-displays -h
usage: nwg-displays [-h] [-g] [-o OUTPUTS_PATH] [-n NUM_WS] [-v]

options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -g, --generic_names   use Generic output names
  -o OUTPUTS_PATH, --outputs_path OUTPUTS_PATH
                        path to save Outputs config to, default: /home/piotr/.config/sway/outputs
  -n NUM_WS, --num_ws NUM_WS
                        number of Workspaces in use, default: 8
  -v, --version         display version information

The configuration saved to a file may be easily used in the sway config:

...
include ~/.config/sway/outputs
...

The program also saves the ~/.config/sway/workspaces file, which defines the workspace -> output associations.

workspace 1 output DP-1
workspace 2 output DP-1
workspace 3 output DP-1
workspace 4 output eDP-1
workspace 5 output eDP-1
workspace 6 output eDP-1
workspace 7 output HDMI-A-1
workspace 8 output HDMI-A-1

You may include it in the sway config file, instead of editing associations manually:

...
include ~/.config/sway/workspaces
...

Use --generic_names if your output names happen to be different on every restart, e.g. when you use Thunderbolt outputs.

Use --num_ws if you use workspaces in a number other than 8.

Settings

The runtime configuration file is placed in your config directory, like ~/.config/nwg-displays/config. It's a simple jsnon file:

{
  "view-scale": 0.15,
  "snap-threshold": 10,
  "indicator-timeout": 500
}

• view-scale does not need to be changed manually. The GUI takes care of that.
• snap-threshold specifies the flush margin of widgets representing displays. I added this value just in case, as I have no hi DPI display to test the stuff on.
• indicator-timeout determines how long (in milliseconds) the overlay identifying screens should be visible. Set 0 to turn overlays off.