Cage Is A New Wayland Compositor For Kiosk/Full-Screen-One-App Deployments

Jente Hidskes, the developer who last year overhauled the Piper mouse configuration utility as part of libratbag via GSoC 2017, announced that he recently began developing his own Wayland compositor to fill a void.

Hiskes' "Cage" compositor isn't just yet-another-Wayland-compositor hobbyist project, but is designed to fill a void where there hasn't been much Wayland activity: a compositor focused on a kiosk mode where it's effectively for supporting a single application running maximized the entire time and no other access to the system. There isn't any major Wayland compositor exclusively focused on that use-case, well, besides Canonical's Mir Kiosk work they have been pursuing that folds into their Wayland offering.

Hidskes has been working on the Cage kiosk Wayland compositor as a project for a home automation system. The compositor is up and running but not yet feature complete with features like touch input not yet in place. Cage is building atop WLROOTS, the Wayland library developed in part by Sway, for doing much of the heavy lifting and making the compositor easy to extend.

More details on Cage via Jente's blog. The code is hosted on GitHub.