Multiple Mouse Cursors in Wayland
21 hours ago
- Multiple mice/keyboards can be attached to one Linux computer for multi-player collaboration on Wayland.
- The core Wayland protocol has deep multi-seat support, linking input events to specific seats.
- Among compositors, sway offers excellent multi-seat support with per-seat window focus; Weston has it but setup is complex; River supports it; niri lacks proper support.
- GTK has conceptual multi-seat support but fails to register new seats after app launch; SDL has partial support but needs patches for absolute mouse mode.
- A multi-seat GTK text widget and a LÖVE physics playground were created as proof-of-concept applications.
- wayvnc with transient seats allows remote collaboration, and novnc provides a browser-based VNC client.
- Kitty terminal only reacts to first seat, Alacritty works with all seats; Firefox works if seats exist at launch; Chromium ignores extra seats.
- The author invites contributions to fill gaps like fixing GTK seat registration, improving KiTTY, and adding River protocol support.