Skip to content

Popups or dialogs not recognized by Sway WM as floating windows

Version information

  • Thunar 4.18.11
  • Void Linux (amd64, glibc)
  • Sway 1.9 (Wayland Tiling Window Manager) and the Xfce desktop 4.18 are installed.

Steps to reproduce

  1. Open Thunar (tiling or floating, doesn't matter) in a Sway session
  2. Attempt to copy/paste a file that already exists on the target directory, causing a conflict resolution dialog to open

Current behavior

2024-09-05T15_40_42_963368984-03_00

Thunar is started as a Wayland application. It appears to be missing attributes that would allow Sway to recognize these dialogs as floating windows.

Expected outcome

2024-09-05T15_40_07_392204212-03_00

I made the following question on the #sway IRC channel:

For a Wayland app, is there an attribute that identifies popup/dialog windows? Something we could match with CRITERIA. For example, Thunar 'File Operation Progress' dialog is tiled when it should be floating. I wonder if there's anything Xfce developers can do to fix it on their side.

To which Sway maintainer kennylevinsen replied:

they should just set the parent

Or, set min/max dimensions equal to indicate a non-resizable window

Additional information

Workaround in Sway config:

for_window [app_id="thunar" title="^File Operation Progress$"] floating enable
for_window [app_id="thunar" title="^Confirm to replace files$"] floating enable
Edited by Douglas