How I built native Wayland window tracking across Hyprland, GNOME and KDE in C++23
The article discusses the challenges of tracking active windows on Wayland due to the lack of a unified API. It details the author's implementation of a solution for three popular Wayland compositors: Hyprland, GNOME, and KDE. Each compositor presents unique obstacles, requiring different approaches to achieve reliable window tracking.
- ▪Hyprland provides a straightforward IPC socket and CLI tool for retrieving the active window as JSON.
- ▪GNOME lacks an official API, necessitating the use of a shell extension to access the active window information.
- ▪KDE's KWin scripting requires a workaround involving JavaScript injection and scraping output from the system journal.
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| Original publisher | DEV.to (Top) |
| Canonical URL | https://dev.to/plexescor/how-i-built-native-wayland-window-tracking-across-hyprland-gnome-and-kde-in-c23-2lk8 |
| Publication time | Sat, 16 May 2026 11:24:22 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-16T11:40:18.366Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-16T11:40:18.366Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | hlMQ0CJ1gg4A |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
try { if(localStorage) { let currentUser = localStorage.getItem('current_user'); if (currentUser) { currentUser = JSON.parse(currentUser); if (currentUser.id === 3932680) { document.getElementById('article-show-container').classList.add('current-user-is-article-author'); } } } } catch (e) { console.error(e); } Plexescor (Abhijot Singh) Posted on May 16 How I built native Wayland window tracking across Hyprland, GNOME and KDE in C++23 #cpp #linux #wayland #productivity If you've ever tried to get the currently focused window on Wayland, you know it's a mess. There's no unified API. Every compositor does it differently. X11 had _NET_ACTIVE_WINDOW and everyone just used that.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at DEV.to (Top).
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