Pete's Points

Year of Wayland on the Desktop

Unknown — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 05:00:24 +0000

Disclaimer: Lengthy Draft Period</h2>
Most of this post was authored in June 2025 then sat around as a draft for 8 months (things got hard at work). But there's too much material for me to fully adjust it, so this is mostly a stale post with some small updates at the bottom</p>

X11, thank you for your service</h2>
After struggling with getting awesomewm+X11 to respond fast enough to my leader keybind, for like a million years, plus seeing some interesting wayland compositor projects float across hacker news, I decided to see if claude code could help me set up a wayland session configuration alongside my awesomewm+X11 setup that has been my daily driver for the last 5 years give or take.</p>
This post will document some of the packages and configurations I have so far. This is mostly for future me to reference. It's early days and since my work machine is a mac I don't clock that many hours using linux on the desktop anymore, so my needs are relatively basic these days.</p>

Experiments</h2>
I ended up over several months putting significant work toward using niri, then KDE plasma, then hyprland, then back to niri. Each environment had a few compelling things and a few deal-breaker issues. Overall it has not been a great experience. At the moment I have no plans to go back to X11+awesome since the slowness issues I have there are a real nuisance, but overall wayland has been a pain to work with and I've had to cobble together every - damn - thing one at a time. Briefly, the experiment results were:</p>

niri try 1

overall promising</li>
rows & columns layout is interesting</li>
overview is both useful and fancy</li>
I got tired of ONLY having keyboard shortcuts for everything</li> </ul> </li>
KDE plasma

works great for a basic traditional desktop</li>
no performance issues</li>
scripting KWin was very limited and quite bizarre</li>
I would need to rely on keybinds and scripting a lot less</li>
The script debugging workflow is awful</li>
during this experiment, I switched display manager from lightdm to SDDM and ended up liking it and keeping it</li>
the dotfiles situation is absolute madness and I bailed within a week. Don't put application cache data in my `~/.config</code> ya dingleheads!</li> </ul> </li>`
hyprland more community add-ons available relative to niri</li> window manager tracks focus history which is useful</li> window rules debugging is deeply unfun</li> deal breaker issues with dialog boxes in FreeCAD</li> 1Password dialog box busted</li> </ul> </li> niri try 2 had to go back to niri so I could use 1Password and FreeCAD</li> </ul> </li> </ul> I find myself thinking about buying a used M3 macbook and just having a laptop that works. But for now it's OK so on with the details.</p> Compositor: niri</h2> I'm trying niri</a> as my compositor. It seemed like this or hyprland</a> were the only 2 interesting choices. The fact that niri is written in rust, uses kdl</a> as its config file format, and has an interesting workspace+window organization approach was enough to convince me to take it for a spin.</p> I was able to get my lightdm</a> display manager (login screen) configured with an additional session type and log in to niri pretty easily. This left my awesomewm+X11 setup intact so I was in safe sandbox mode for experimenting, which I had been worried might be tricky but so far all is well.</p> Essentials: the same</h2> Most of my essentials worked in wayland without any changes or with very common changes:</p> ghostty terminal</li> kitty terminal</li> firefox web browser</li> 1password password manager</li> obsidian note taking</li> music with youtube music, mpd, and ario</li> </ul> Application Switching with gofi leader keys</h2> My desktop interaction is based upon a leader key modal model. Tapping my leader key brings up a small app I wrote, gofi, which presents me with a menu heirarchy navigable with single-letter mappings. So for example leader then "b" focuses my web browser. leader then "t" focuses my terminal. This lets me jump to my primary apps super fast. For less common things I can nest into a menu, so for example leader then "a" (mnemonic "applications") then "c" brings up a calculator. But the mechanism gofi uses to focus windows is very tightly coupled to the window manager, which for X11 was awesomewm. So gofi itself didn't need any niri changes, but I did need a separate gofi config file just for niri, and I had to port the script I have that focuses windows by application to niri, so I wrote ~/bin/niri-focus</code> which uses niri msg --json windows</code> and jq</code> to identify windows and tell niri to switch focus to them by id.</p> I bound my leader key to locate the window which has gofi running inside ghostty, and if not present to start it. That all came together fairly easily although porting ~/bin/niri-focus</code> had a learning curve. But I've scripted both awesomewm and hammerspoon this way already so I had a very clear idea of how things should work.</p> During niri experiment 2, I found wlr-which-key</a> which is essentially an exact functional equivalent of gofi, but written in rust as a true GUI app with a floating window. I had claude code port my gofi config to wlr-which-key and it worked perfectly the first time, so now I finally have a proper leader app.</p> Menu Bar</h2> By default, niri has essentially no UI whatsoever. There's no task bar or dock or anything. It seems the vibes in wayland favor this. Like ideal state after login is some fancy desktop wallpaper image and literally no other pixels. There's even screen lockers that are just like "it seems like your keyboard and mouse are broken until you type the correct password and hit enter then things just magically start working".</p> Anyway, wayland is weird about task bars and they call them something like layer shells or something. I have a nearly-default waybar</a> config and it's fine I guess. My awesomewm wibar was perfectly dialed. I had it along the left edge with a vertical window list so I could see enough of the title of every window, and the bottom left corner was a dense cluster of exactly the widgets I want and nothing I don't.</p> I eventually discovered eww</a> and eventually got that dialed for a vertical bar on the left edge with tray widgets at the bottom and a window list at the top. It's very nice. The main annoying bit of glue is the watch.sh</code> script I need to integrate eww with niri. It's kind of silly but it mostly works and things like highlighting the focused window update in real time correctly.</p> I think the author of niri is on to something with this idea of your stable reference stuff like your browser going on a workspace directly adjacent to a workspace with your activity-specific tools (like an editor and terminal) so you can navigate in space horizontally for your main flow and then up/down to reference docs etc.</p> niri keybindings and app-nav</h2> I got my keybindings which I call "row nav" set up pretty nicely. I hold a combo on my right hand then my left hand gets 3 rows of hjkl style vim directions:</p> home row is "app nav" which means left/right is tabs and up/down is windows in the same app (or something that roughly matches this paradigm)</li> bottom row is window manager nav so niri columns left/right and workspaces up/down</li> top row is regular arrow keys which I mostly use for "up" in terminal to get the previous command and this layer has enter too so I can do things like switch between several terminal tabs and re-run the previous command in them all without lifting my right hand layer mod.</li> </ul> The app-nav part relies on querying niri to figure out which app is focused, then dispatching the correct simulated hotkey to do things like "previous tab" and "next tab" etc. This needed to be ported to wayland as described below.</p> sending hotkeys from scripts: wtype</h2> As an alternative to X11's xdotool</code> I ported my stuff to wtype</code>. So far so good.</p> Clipboard history and scripting</h2> I use the clipboard from scripts super heavily and it's critical to many of my automations. I did get copyq</code> working sort of which is what I use on X11, but there were some issues with its window, so I bounced over to cliphist</code> and wofi</code> for the chooser. I was able to get my snippet system working fairly easily with these tools.</p> fuzzy chooser: wofi</h2> I've completely adopted a dmenu</code>/rofi</code> style fuzzy matching workflow to the level of "it's a complete lifestyle" so I installed and started integrating wofi</code> right away. I can't believe fuzzy matching is not the default, but once you set the config file to fuzzy matching, it works great for my usage.</p> wifi manager: iwgtk and iwd</h2> On X11 I run NetworkManager</code> and nm-applet</code>. They are kind of clunky and I sort of hate them, but they work. There's a bunch of silly nonsense here I don't really want to bother with, but I ended up using iwd</code> and iwgtk</code>. I'm not sure why the ecosystem for this is so weird, but it is. It's like, in the default config it will let you pick a wifi network and join it, and then like just not</strong> run DHCP client to actually make it work. There's some linux mind virus that is like "whoa whoa whoa we can't assume folks want to use an Internet Protocol Address. What if they are on a commune with a local IPv6+lora configuration?". "What about if they are in a deep sea submarine???". It's ridiculous and completely stupid. So I went in to the config file like every single user must do and said "yes I connect to the wifi and internet the same way billions of people do across the world" and then it started working.</p> notifications: dunst</h2> My dunst</code> setup just worked. It's compatible with both X11 and wayland I think. Literally nothing to do. I tried my ~/bin/notify</code> script and it worked first time. On to the next.</p> screenshots: grim + slurp + satty</h2> This one went overboard in the "do one thing, even if that thing is obviously an incomplete thing" so it seems the waylanders think 3 programs to take a screenshot is the correct design. Anyway I 100% just followed claude's advice on this one and ported my scripts from flameshot to this stack of grim</code> for the actual screenshotting plus slurp</code> I guess for selecting a region on the screen and satty</code> for annotating the resulting image with text and arrows etc.</p> bambu studio 3D printing slicer</h2> So far one important app that is giving me trouble is the Bambu Studio program I use for 3D printing. It seems it does not support wayland directly and I have yet to figure out if there's some X11 compatibility wrapping I can do to trick it in to working.</p> screen locking: swaylock</h2> This is another linux mind virus of you need 7 programs to do something every operating system just does with no configuration. But anyway, detecting when user input goes idle, and actually locking the screen in response to that are apparently separate programs in wayland land. I didn't yet want to futz with idle detection so I got a swaylock</code> 1-liner command integrated into my ~/bin/lock-screen</code> script and that's adequate.</p> It's kind of funny and kind of nice that out of the box, once you're logged in, it'll just leave you logged in and your computer open forever. Post pandemic it's like, no one is going to come into my house and try to figure out my extremely bizarre keyboard & computer setup and somehow like hack my gmail or something. Maybe I don't need to be typing my password dozens of times a day to mitigate that attack vector like the old days of working in crowded insecure offices.</p> GUI prompts for input: yad</h2> It seems yad</code> mostly supports both X11 and wayland, so the scripts where I use it to pop up a text input seem to work fine.</p> leader key focus</h2> One thing that is a huge win for me is switching keyboard focus into wlr-which-key or gofi when I hit the leader key seems to be fast enough to not bother me, and not send accidental keystrokes to the current window. I never managed to solve this on awesomewm so this the killer feature for me.</p> X11 nonsense with xwayland</h2> Both Bambu Studio and Prusa Slicer seem to not support wayland so I have to do X11 compatibility sadness.</p> Xwayland -geometry $(wlr-randr | grep preferred| awk '{print $1}') :1 & DISPLAY=:1 prusa-slicer </code></pre> Update 8 months later</h2> I'm still on niri and I even switched my media server laptop to niri too. There are still shortcomings and mismatches with my ideal workflow, but overall it's excellent. My eww sidebar is great. I've been able to send slides to an external monitor for teaching classes without doing 20 minutes of research. There's nothing even slightly making me miss X11. All of my absurd keyboard customization nonsense is handled by keyd</code> which is amazing and works at the correct system level.</p>


Guitar Pedal PCB
Unknown — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 01:00:24 +0000
This fall I collaborated with my friend Brock on a guitar pedal project. It's based on a pedal schematic called "Yet Another Fuzz Face". Brock had done electronics projects but never designed and ordered a custom PCB. So I encouraged him to try inputting his schematic in KiCAD and designing a small circuit board he could mount into his guitar pedal enclosure. There was a pretty steep learning curve for KiCAD but he struggled through it and got a PCB design that looked good, was small enough to fit nicely inside the pedal, and passed the design rule checker.</p>
So we ordered 10 prototype PCBs from PCBWay</a>, which arrived in just a few days.</p>
Here's a video of us unboxing the circuit boards. Thanks for PCBWay for sponsoring this project and getting another hobbyist maker their first custom circuit board!</p>

</iframe>
</div>


Custom CNC Desktop Mark II
Unknown — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 21:24:39 +0000
I made another custom desktop on the CNC with recesses for my split keyboard. I'm really happy with how it came out. I got the project finished up and installed over the Thanksgiving holiday break, and my wife painted two of the walls in my office - one has a logogram from the movie "Arrival", and the other is a geometric pattern. All this adds up to make my office looking and feeling so much nicer now!</p>

  
  custom desktop mark II</figcaption>
</figure>

  
  low angle shot showing the recess depth</figcaption>
</figure>

  
  center view</figcaption>
</figure>
Arrival Logogram Artwork</h2>
The movie "Arrival" contains my all-time favorite visual effect. The alien writing system, referred to as logograms in the movie, are these strikingly beautiful circular smoke patterns. I thought it would be a great thing to put in my office and make an awesome background for video calls. My wife has done a few paintings directly on the walls using a projector to establish a baseline pencil sketch. So that's what she did and it came out great. On another wall I was inspired by a nearby commercial building with a geometric mountain pattern, and she did that on the adjacent wall.</p>

  
  Arrival logogram artwork: Louise has question</figcaption>
</figure>

  
  view of whole office with geometric wall pattern, Arrival art, and desktop setups for my work and personal workstations</figcaption>
</figure>
CNC Desktop Refinements</h2>
Mark I was made of 3 layers of MDF. For this version, with more CNC & CAM experienced, I realized I could get by with 2 layers by treating them like a sandwich and milling out the interior of both slices. So I milled the cable channels into the top piece by placing it into the CNC upside down. This also means the final assembly is 1" thick and lighter weight.</p>
I have been bumping my swivel chair into the armrests a bit, so I shrunk those down a few inches to hopefully reduce that.</p>
I moved the coffee recess back a bit to try to leave full thickness in the center where my flexispot desk has 4 screws for attaching the desktop to the base. In the end there's only clearance for 2 of the 4 screws, which is better. I just omit the other 2 screws because installing them they would poke up into the coffee mug recess because there's only about 1/4" of material at that position.</p>
I did a roundover on the edge to hopefully make it a bit more durable against dings.</p>
Even though the desktop overall is thinner, I had a bigger depth to work with for the keyboard recess, so they are recessed quite a bit deeper such that most of the keycaps are below the desktop surface. Only the tilted angle keycaps stick out of the recess by a tiny bit at their tips.</p>
Ergonomics and typing video</h2>
Here's videos of me typing at the desk both seated and standing.</p>

</iframe>
</div>
Failures</h2>
I did a CNC attempt with 1/2" plywood. It did not cut well due to layers wanting to chip and splinter. That model had the cable channels too deep and the bottom of them too thin, so there was huge chunks that just exploded out entirely during CNC and it was an irrecoverable failure. After that I decided to go back to MDF which mills very consistently and nicely.</p>
I had several CAD and CAM issues this time around. Even more than the first one which was unexpected.</p>
I forgot to add tabs and had the dreaded projectile cutout situation at one point. Nothing went beyond the surface of the CNC though so no injuries.</p>
In the revised CAD for this, I made a square at 7" per side. Then I filleted the corners in the sketch. And for some reason when that happens, FreeCAD drops most of the dimension constraints. I re-added the 7" dimension to the y axis but forgot to re-add it to the x-axis. So I ended up with rectangles 7" by 6.69" very unexpectedly. Definitely a head scratcher when the keyboard insert didn't fit by a large margin. As a workaround, I had to adjust the 3D print to match those dimensions, and luckily there's enough extra space to still fit the keyboard.</p>
The deep recess meant my thumb would hit the edge of the keyboard holder insert, so I had to adjust the model to remove the wall there to make clearance.</p>
Heading back to work tomorrow after the holiday break should be a lot more pleasant and inspiring surrounded by cool art and furniture I made to be highly tailored to me.</p>


Catalog of Custom 3D Prints
Unknown — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 18:27:36 +0000
I felt a need to review all the custom CAD projects I've done and write up something about them. Many of them are trivial and don't warrant any online posts or even sharing the models. But I knew I had done many, many of these and I wanted to survey them and look at patterns, skill building, actual utility, etc.</p>
The easiest data I have at hand is my git repo of .FCStd FreeCAD project files. This represents at least 95% of my projects, but will omit a minority of things I've done in Fusion, TinkerCAD, or a few other CAD programs.</p>
stats and categories</h2>

225 total designs</li>
holders/mounts/racks: 50</li>
bushings/washers/clips/etc: 5</li>
door related: 16</li>
bespoke designs for friends

antique wash basin plug</li>
mount for speaker on bike frame</li>
replacement chair leg foot</li>
rain barrel adapter</li>
</ul>
</li>
repairs for major items

wheel barrow bushing</li>
pergola cotter pin</li>
sun umbrella housing</li>
bed frame bolt spacer replacement</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>

  
  antique wash basin plug I duplicated</figcaption>
</figure>
earliest projects</h2>
I'm pretty sure the first things I tried to CAD, even before I knew how to use a 3D printer, were belt clips for my everyday carry which I would then bring to the library and have them print them. At the time I had no idea how much skill and effort the slicing and printing process was, and that it was a far cry from "transfer the .stl file to the printer and click print". I think I also had the library print me some tent posts for my ErgoDox split keyboard.</p>
easy project that was not actually easy</h2>
This one for sure goes to a phone holder for my car dashboard. Should be easy, right? Well I iterated on this over the course of 3+ years before both giving up on supporting many phones and just designing it to exactly fit my iPhone 13 Pro, as well as finding online designs that were able to fit a lot more phones with very clever and complex mechanisms.</p>
most ambitious project</h2>
SqueezeBox Keyboard</a> for sure.</p>
simplest CAD that's actually useful</h2>
"TP Tube Tube" literally just a cyclinder a bit narrower than a toilet paper tube that acts as an insert and rolls smoothly even if the cardboard tube is crushed and folded into an oval.</p>
most generally useful</h2>
Probably the index card holder</a>.</p>
published models</h2>
My collection of models is here on printables.com</a></p>
favorite community models</h2>
Things I did not design but found on printables and really like:</p>

light switch lock</a></li>
Car Vent Gravity Phone Holder v4</a></li>
bucket handle</a></li>
</ul>
some community notes</h2>
The "functional print" subset seems way smaller than the figurines and art pieces subset of the community. A lot of hobbyist designs are just not good. Tolerances are all wrong. Fragile. Way too much material, etc. Many people (heyoo gridfinity) are willing to spend WAY more time/effort/material printing multipart or large systems vs just like tossing stuff into shoe boxes and amazon boxes.</p>


Custom CNC Desktop
Unknown — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 14:17:15 +0000
I built a custom desktop on a CNC router. It's a 3-layer stack of 1/2" MDF. It has recessed areas for my split keyboard and coffee mug. Cables can tunnel through the middle layer of the desk. No this is not a desktop PC, it's literally the top of a desk.</p>

  
  desktop view</figcaption>
</figure>
Project Goals</h2>

Replace my add-on forearm rests with a single desktop</li>
Recess my split keyboard into the desk surface for straighter wrist ergonomics</li>
Give my coffee a bit more of a spill-resistant setup</li>
route cabling within channels inside the desktop interior

Especially for the cable connecting the halves of the split keyboard</li>
</ul>
</li>
learn enough CNC for this project</li>
Get experience building with and painting MDF</li>
</ul>
A slow learning curve</h2>
This was my first CNC project. It took months of calendar time to come to fruition - mostly due to scheduling and tooling overhead accessing the CNCs I had access to.</p>
Getting this project done took several months, learning a total of 4 CAD/CAM software processes across 3 operating systems, loading a full sheet of MDF into my van about 4 extra times, and juggling CNC schedules. The details are so boring that I can't even bring myself to type them out. Let's just say "hey, that looks like a great CNC project" does not articulate the requisite overhead.</p>
3D-printed inserts</h2>
I used basic rounded rectangles in the actual MDF with the idea of potentially wanting different inserts over time. So I modeled up inserts for my keyboard's PCB shape using files exported from the ergogen process I used to make my keyboard</a>. In addition to a pocket for the PCB to fit into, I needed to clear space for the cables to be connected and a hole so cables could be routed via the desktop layer 2 tunnels.</p>
I also made a coffee holder for my favorite coffee mug. And before you point out how silly and limiting this is - don't you worry - I made an adapter so my second-favorite coffee mug fits too!</p>

  
  Insert for my Mini coffee mug</figcaption>
</figure>
Key Photos</h2>

  
  front view</figcaption>
</figure>

  
  looking down toward the desktop</figcaption>
</figure>

  
  my old setup with stock parts</figcaption>
</figure>
Social Media Posts</h2>
Feel free to comment, share, upvote, engage your little hearts out!</p>

Reddit /r/ergomechkeyboards</a></li>
Bluesky</a></li>
Mastodon</a></li>
</ul>
Full Photo Gallery of Build Process</h2>




  
    
  </figure>

Pete's Points

Year of Wayland on the Desktop

Disclaimer: Lengthy Draft Period</h2> Most of this post was authored in June 2025 then sat around as a draft for 8 months (things got hard at work). But there's too much material for me to fully adjust it, so this is mostly a stale post with some small updates at the bottom</p>

Essentials: the same</h2> Most of my essentials worked in wayland without any changes or with very common changes:</p> ghostty terminal</li> kitty terminal</li> firefox web browser</li> 1password password manager</li> obsidian note taking</li>

sending hotkeys from scripts: wtype</h2> As an alternative to X11's xdotool</code> I ported my stuff to wtype</code>. So far so good.</p>

Guitar Pedal PCB

Custom CNC Desktop Mark II

Catalog of Custom 3D Prints

stats and categories</h2> 225 total designs</li> holders/mounts/racks: 50</li> bushings/washers/clips/etc: 5</li> door related: 16</li>

most ambitious project</h2> SqueezeBox Keyboard</a> for sure.</p>

most generally useful</h2> Probably the index card holder</a>.</p>

published models</h2> My collection of models is here on printables.com</a></p>

Custom CNC Desktop

Project Goals</h2> Replace my add-on forearm rests with a single desktop</li> Recess my split keyboard into the desk surface for straighter wrist ergonomics</li> Give my coffee a bit more of a spill-resistant setup</li>

Disclaimer: Lengthy Draft Period</h2>
Most of this post was authored in June 2025 then sat around as a draft for 8 months (things got hard at work). But there's too much material for me to fully adjust it, so this is mostly a stale post with some small updates at the bottom</p>

sending hotkeys from scripts: wtype</h2>
As an alternative to X11's `xdotool</code> I ported my stuff to wtype</code>. So far so good.</p>`

most ambitious project</h2>
SqueezeBox Keyboard</a> for sure.</p>

most generally useful</h2>
Probably the index card holder</a>.</p>

published models</h2>
My collection of models is here on printables.com</a></p>