Sway 1.12 Wayland compositor adds HDR support on Vulkan, window capture, and new protocols
Sway 1.12 is now available, marking the latest update to this tiling Wayland compositor. This release introduces several high-impact features for advanced display and workflow management. Users can now capture individual application windows, enhancing screen recording and screenshot capabilities. HDR10 display support is introduced for systems using the Vulkan renderer, allowing compatible hardware to take advantage of higher dynamic range.
Alongside these improvements, Sway 1.12 adds support for several new Wayland protocols, such as color-management-v1, color-representation-v1, xdg-toplevel-tag-v1, ext-workspace-v1, and wl_fixes. While making these advances, this version also updates its base dependency, now requiring wlroots 0.20.0 for compilation and runtime.
Building on display management enhancements, users can set output color profiles using a new --device-primaries option based on color primaries advertised in EDID. The srgb output color profile implementation now uses the full sRGB transfer function, although the practical default remains gamma 2.2. Following input device updates, keypad slide switches are now supported, and the default configuration file introduces key bindings for media playback control via playerctl.
Sway 1.12 also improves startup workflows by supporting display manager launches and no longer blocking startup on unsupported GPUs; users instead receive a clear informational message.
