A Steadier Experience

Screencast privacy rules

Portal privacy rules can block individual windows and layer surfaces from screen shares. Monitor shares show the content behind a blocked window, and a blocked window that uses backdrop blur no longer hides the rest of the monitor.

Shared-window indicator

Windows that are being shared directly show a local indicator, so you can see what leaves your screen. The portal source selector is keyboard navigable across visible, shareable windows and monitors.

Standard output capture

Authorized tools can capture outputs through ext-image-capture-source-v1 and ext-image-copy-capture-v1 on native and nested backends. Capture stops on lock, suspend, or output loss.

Direct captures

halleyctl and the SDK capture an explicit output, node, or region without opening the selection overlay. Saved captures show the usual preview unless --silent is requested.

Separate screenshot privacy

block-screenshot omits matching windows and their popups from Halley's built-in screen and region screenshots, revealing the content behind them. Direct screenshots of protected windows fail. This is separate from portal screencast privacy and does not cover third-party capture tools or direct capture protocols.

Window rules that work together

Match groups and exclusions can select windows by application, title, parent relationship, startup period, keyboard focus, or individual-window screencast status. Opt into window-rule-mode compose to combine matching rules, with later explicit properties taking precedence; existing rules keep their first-match behavior.

Opening behavior and decoration controls

Rules can choose an initial output, Field position, focus, fullscreen, or maximized state, and control borders, shadows, and content corner radius. Appearance and privacy rules reload for existing windows; opening settings apply when a window first maps.

More blur choices

Gaussian and box backdrop blur join the default Dual Kawase method. Switch methods with a configuration reload while retaining existing blur activation, rounded clipping, and client-requested regions.

A continuous window frame

Compositor titlebars meet window content without a visible seam, including with backdrop blur. Rule-enabled window blur follows the displayed client rectangle through fullscreen and maximize transitions.

Per-monitor scaling

view.output.scale accepts numeric and fractional values with live reload. Applications, compositor UI, pointer coordinates, and native-resolution captures scale together, and halleyctl outputs reports the effective scale.

Frame pacing

commit-timing-v1 and fifo-v1 let clients schedule frames precisely on native and nested backends without blocking input, rendering, or unrelated clients.

Animated, exact movement

CLI and keyboard window moves animate with their own animations.window-move easing or spring. halleyctl node move to X Y places a window exactly, and --distance moves it a chosen number of Field units.

Across monitors

The cursor and dragged windows cross gaps between configured monitors, and the selected monitor follows a focused window that moves to another output.

Pan from anywhere

Bind pan-field-always to start a camera drag over windows, titlebars, nodes, or wallpaper. It respects fullscreen, camera owners, shell overlays, and pointer constraints. Pans end with the button that started them.

Contributed by @Ketari-G · Pull request

Monitor-aware navigation

Alt+Tab, Apogee, and centered navigation preserve every application's fullscreen state when selecting a window on another monitor. On the same monitor, ordinary applications leave fullscreen cleanly and identified games park until resumed.

Steadier XWayland

XWayland fullscreen, game mode, minimize, and restore keep client state, geometry, and animations consistent, including when the underlying surface is replaced.

Smoother transitions

Fullscreen, maximize, and windowed transitions keep both client images within the same rounded, animated bounds. Transitions follow client acceptance, keep outgoing content live while waiting, and fade compositor chrome back in as fullscreen exits.

Keyboard correctness

Keys and lock-key modifiers follow Wayland event order, held keys survive extra keyboards, and Caps, Num, and Scroll Lock indicators stay in sync across devices.

Pinned windows stay open

Pinned windows are exempt from automatic decay. You can still collapse them manually, and unpinning starts a fresh decay timer.

Retrieve the window you selected

Running-window selections through Lift and the API select the correct monitor and workspace, reveal stack and overflow members, restore collapsed windows, and center Field targets.

Empty clusters keep their controls

Moving the last window to another monitor preserves the close-binding hint. Hints remain visible across monitor focus changes, while two-press deletion stays scoped to the selected monitor.

Dialogs that stay with their parents

xdg-dialog-v1 and xdg-foreign-v2 let applications and portal dialogs, including Firefox's Save As, declare their parents and stay above them. Closing a focused Field dialog returns focus to its nearest eligible parent.

Input methods survive locking

Native Wayland input methods stay connected across screen lock and resume after unlocking. Composition and keyboard grabs are suspended during the lock, lock-screen input stays isolated, and unfinished composition is discarded at the lock boundary.

Accessibility

Initial compositor accessibility information is exposed through AccessKit, with opt-in supervision of a trusted Orca executable across restarts.

Power and idle

wlr-output-power-management lets approved tools control individual displays on the native backend, and the org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver service handles GTK's idle-inhibition fallback.

Nix and NixOS

A pinned Nix flake provides the compositor, companion tools, portal integration, a development shell, an overlay, and a NixOS session module. The accessibility supervisor test uses the Nix-provided executable path.

Contributed by @pirate-boop · Pull request