Wayland's Weston Received New Features Yesterday

The Weston reference compositor to Wayland received a few more features yesterday in mainline Git.

While some of the changes have been previously talked about on Phoronix when they were in early development patch form on the lists, the newly-committed work includes:

- There's been work on Weston to support run-time switchable renderers for Weston. That's now been accomplished and with the latest Git code it's easy to switch from Pixman to the OpenGL renderer. The debug binding of "mod-shift-space W" will now cause the compositor to switch from using the software-based Pixman renderer to the OpenGL renderer. This key-bind renderer switching is useful for debugging, stressing the run-time switchable renderer support, and there's cases where the OpenGL renderer isn't used right away by Weston since the Pixman renderer is able to start-up more quickly.

- Weston now has alt-tab support and the Exposay (Exposé) feature has been merged. The "Exposay" feature for Weston was previously reported on as part of Raspberry Pi Wayland work and scales all currently-open windows to be shown overlaid across the desktop. It's a nice means of windows switching.

- A move/scale animation was added. "Add an animation which moves a surface to a new location, at the same time as also rescaling it to a different size from the origin, rather than the existing scale animation which resizes from the centre."

- Add modifier-only binding. "Add the ability to bind to modifiers; the binding is armed when a key which sets the requested modifier is pressed, and triggered if the key is released with no other keys having been pressed in the meantime, as well as mouse buttons or scroll axes."