nwg-displays

nwg-displays

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

Nwg-displays is an output management utility for sway, Hyprland, Niri and mangowm Wayland compositor, inspired by wdisplays and wlay. The program 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, Hyprland, Niri and mangowm only.

Installation

Install from your linux distribution repository if possible.

Otherwise, clone this repository and run the install.sh script.

Dependencies

• gtk-layer-shell
• gtk3
• python
• python-gobject
• python-i3ipc
• python-build (make)
• python-installer (make)
• python-setuptools (make)
• python-wheel (make)

Usage

$  nwg-displays -h
usage: nwg-displays [-h] [-m MONITORS_PATH] [-n NUM_WS] [-v]

options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -m MONITORS_PATH, --monitors_path MONITORS_PATH
                        path to save the monitors.conf file to, default: ~/.config/hypr/monitors.conf
  -n NUM_WS, --num_ws NUM_WS
                        number of Workspaces in use, default: 10
  -v, --version         display version information

sway

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.

Hyprland

Monitors:

Instead of configuring as described in Wiki, insert this line:

source = ~/.config/hypr/monitors.conf

For version 0.55 and greater (using Lua), insert this line:

require("monitors")

Default workspace and Binding workspaces to a monitor:

Insert:

source = ~/.config/hypr/workspaces.conf

For version 0.55 and greater, insert:

require("workspaces")

Do not set disable_autoreload true in Hyprland settings, or you’ll have to reload Hyprland manually after applying changes.

Niri

Outputs:

The program automatically adds an include directive to your ~/.config/niri/config.kdl file:

include "monitor.kdl"

The configuration is saved to ~/.config/niri/monitor.kdl in KDL format:

Niri will automatically reload the configuration when you apply settings in nwg-displays.

Note: Niri uses dynamic workspaces, so the workspace assignment feature is not available for Niri.

mangowm

Monitors:

Requires wlr-randr to query monitor state.

The configuration is saved to ~/.config/mango/monitors.conf. Make sure your config sources this file, e.g. with:

source_optional=./monitors.conf

Note: Mango uses dynamic tags, so the workspace assignment feature is not available for Mango.

Settings

The runtime configuration file is placed in your config directory, like ~/.config/nwg-displays/config. It’s a simple JSON 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 high-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.