alttabway 0.4.2

Alt-tab window switcher for wayland compositors
Documentation

alttabway

Finally, an alt-tab window switcher with actual window previews. Only Hyprland is supported at the moment.

Preview

Usage

You will need cargo installed.

cargo install alttabway

alttabway is now installed! Follow compositor specific instructions to start the daemon and bind the hotkey.

  • Hyprland

    Add the following lines to your ~/.config/hypr/hyprland.conf

    exec-once = alttabway daemon &
binde = ALT, Tab, exec, alttabway show --next
binde = ALT SHIFT, Tab, exec, alttabway show --previous

# Optional - set this if you have blur enabled on Hyprland
layerrule = blur on, ignore_alpha 0, match:namespace ^alttabway$

    # Activate using Ctrl+Super+Tab
binde = CTRL SUPER, Tab, exec, alttabway show --next --modifiers-held ctrl,super
binde = CTRL SUPER SHIFT, Tab, exec, alttabway show --previous --modifiers-held ctrl,super

FAQ

The window preview is sometimes missing. Why?

alttabway uses wlr-screencopy-unstable-v1 to generate a preview of your active window. Sometimes, it is unable to generate this preview if you open a window and navigate away from it too quickly.

Sometimes there's a delay between holding the alt-tab hotkey and the window showing up

Window preview resizing runs on the main thread and needs to move to a background thread. Should be fixed soon.

Can I use a different hotkey combination?

No

Please support $COMPOSITOR

alttabway only provides support for Hyprland (Sway and Niri coming in the near future). Open an issue if you'd like support for your compositor. Typically the compositor should implement the following protocols.

  • wlr-foreign-toplevel-management-unstable-v1 for the list of top level windows and to activate one
  • wlr-screencopy-unstable-v1 to take a capture of a region on screen.
    • Window positions/dimensions are required as well, typically via ipc.

The alttabway window doesn't show up

Try setting render_backend to Vulkan, Gl or Software in the configuration.

Compile fails with "try setting PKG_CONFIG_PATH to the directory containing wayland-client.pc/xkbcommon.pc"

Some required dependencies are missing. On debian based distros, run apt install libwayland-dev libxkbcommon-dev