Pinnacle-comp Dotfiles

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Smithay-based, AwesomeWM-inspired Wayland compositor riced with the City Lights theme: twelve clickable tag pills, night-sky waybar, amber streetlight accents.

✨ Features

12 clickable tags: waybar pills that really switch workspaces, driven straight through Pinnacle's gRPC API.
City Lights theme: transparent night-sky pills, muted blue-gray borders, warm amber (#F4D068) accents.
Active tag = filled amber button, inactive tags sheer — exactly the classic workspace look.
Rofi launcher & powermenu, swaybg wallpaper, grim screenshots on Print.
Snowcap disabled on purpose — no forced border colors, clean borderless look (see below).
Installed with trizen — the whole compositor comes from the AUR.

📦 Installation

Pinnacle itself:

trizen -S pinnacle-comp

Useful companions (most are AUR/extra packages you likely already have):

trizen -S waybar rofi swaybg grim lxterminal brightnessctl playerctl pipewire

Then drop the configs in place:

cp -r configs/pinnacle ~/.config/pinnacle

Log into the Pinnacle session from your display manager.

🖱️ Clickable workspaces in Waybar — the full story

This is the heart of this repo. Stock waybar + stock Pinnacle cannot switch workspaces on click. Here is why, and how we fixed it.

The problem

Pinnacle does not have workspaces — it has tags (dwm/AwesomeWM style). Several tags can be active at once. Waybar's ext/workspaces module speaks the ext-workspace-v1 protocol, and on click it sends activate. Pinnacle honours that literally: it makes the clicked tag active in addition to the current one. Result: the pill highlights, but the screen never "switches". Keybinds work because the Lua config calls Tag.get(n):switch_to(), which activates one tag and deactivates all others.

The solution in one sentence

Waybar on-click → tiny shell script → pinnacle client -e '<lua>' → gRPC socket → switch_to().

pinnacle client ships with the compositor and accepts -e to execute a Lua string against the running instance. Everything below is just removing the three rocks in that path.

Rock 1 — the Lua version mismatch

The Pinnacle Lua API is installed for Lua 5.4 (/usr/share/lua/5.4/pinnacle.lua), but pinnacle client spawns the system lua, which on Arch is 5.5 → module 'pinnacle' not found. (Loading the 5.4 paths manually also fails, because pinnacle.lua invokes luarocks.loader, which rewrites the search paths for the running version.)

Fix — a shim so the client gets the right interpreter:

mkdir -p ~/.bin
printf '#!/bin/sh\nexec /usr/bin/lua5.4 "$@"\n' > ~/.bin/lua
chmod +x ~/.bin/lua

Scripts then run with PATH="$HOME/.bin:$PATH" pinnacle client ....

Rock 2 — the gRPC socket environment variable

The client refuses to start without PINNACLE_GRPC_SOCKET. Pinnacle opens the socket at /run/user/<uid>/pinnacle-grpc-<PID>.sock — note the PID in the name.

Dead Pinnacle processes leave corpse sockets behind. A naive ls | head -n1 picks them alphabetically, and connecting to a corpse yields socket:connect: Connection refused. Fix — address the socket by the live PID, newest file as fallback:

PID="$(pgrep -x pinnacle | head -n1)"
export PINNACLE_GRPC_SOCKET="/run/user/1000/pinnacle-grpc-$PID.sock"
[ -S "$PINNACLE_GRPC_SOCKET" ] || export PINNACLE_GRPC_SOCKET="$(ls -t /run/user/1000/pinnacle-grpc-*.sock 2>/dev/null | head -n1)"

The scripts (`scripts/`)

switch_tag.sh — called by waybar on click; switches exclusively:

#!/bin/bash
TAG="$1"
[ -z "$TAG" ] && exit 1
PID="$(pgrep -x pinnacle | head -n1)"
export PINNACLE_GRPC_SOCKET="/run/user/1000/pinnacle-grpc-$PID.sock"
[ -S "$PINNACLE_GRPC_SOCKET" ] || export PINNACLE_GRPC_SOCKET="$(ls -t /run/user/1000/pinnacle-grpc-*.sock 2>/dev/null | head -n1)"
[ -z "$PINNACLE_GRPC_SOCKET" ] && exit 1
PATH="$HOME/.bin:$PATH" exec pinnacle client -e "require('pinnacle.tag').get('$TAG'):switch_to()" >/dev/null 2>&1

tag_state.sh — polled by waybar; reports the tag as JSON so the active one gets a CSS class:

#!/bin/bash
TAG="$1"
PID="$(pgrep -x pinnacle | head -n1)"
export PINNACLE_GRPC_SOCKET="/run/user/1000/pinnacle-grpc-$PID.sock"
[ -S "$PINNACLE_GRPC_SOCKET" ] || export PINNACLE_GRPC_SOCKET="$(ls -t /run/user/1000/pinnacle-grpc-*.sock 2>/dev/null | head -n1)"
[ -z "$PINNACLE_GRPC_SOCKET" ] && exit 1
ACTIVE="$(PATH="$HOME/.bin:$PATH" pinnacle client -e "print(tostring(require('pinnacle.tag').get('$TAG'):active()))" 2>/dev/null | tail -n1)"
if [ "$ACTIVE" = "true" ]; then
    printf '{"text": "%s", "class": "active"}\n' "$TAG"
else
    printf '{"text": "%s", "class": "idle"}\n' "$TAG"
fi

Waybar `config.jsonc`

ext/workspaces is removed entirely. Twelve custom modules take its place (one per tag), plus they sit in modules-left:

"custom/tag1": { "exec": "~/.config/pinnacle/scripts/tag_state.sh 1", "interval": 2, "return-type": "json", "on-click": "~/.config/pinnacle/scripts/switch_tag.sh 1", "tooltip": false },
/* ... repeat for 2–12 ... */

Waybar `style.css` (the pill)

Each tag is a segment of one sheer pill; first and last segments carry the rounded caps; the active class paints the filled amber button:

#custom-tag1, /* … */ #custom-tag12 {
    background: @night-sky;
    border-top: 1px solid @city-border;
    border-bottom: 1px solid @city-border;
    padding: 2px 9px;
    color: @off-white;
}
#custom-tag1  { border-left: 1px solid @city-border;  border-radius: 17px 0 0 17px; }
#custom-tag12 { border-right: 1px solid @city-border; border-radius: 0 17px 17px 0; margin-right: 4px; }
#custom-tag1.active, /* … */ #custom-tag12.active {
    background: @streetlight;
    color: @shadow;
    font-weight: bold;
    border-radius: 14px;
}

Restarting waybar — the ghost-bar trap

Waybar reads its files only at startup. After any change, old instances keep the old look and stack on top of new ones, which causes endless "but I changed it" confusion. Always:

pkill -9 waybar
waybar -c ~/.config/pinnacle/waybar/config.jsonc -s ~/.config/pinnacle/waybar/style.css >/dev/null 2>&1 &

❄️ Why Snowcap is disabled

Snowcap is Pinnacle's widget/decoration addon. Its focus_border_with_titlebar decoration paints its own border colors, which override any custom border color you set — the "weird colored borders" problem. In config.lua the require is simply commented out:

-- local Snowcap = require("pinnacle.snowcap")

Every if Snowcap then ... end block then safely skips, and the session runs clean and borderless. To re-enable, uncomment the line and hit super+ctrl+r.

⌨️ Key keybinds (mod = super)

Bind	Action
super + 1–9 / 0 / F1 / F2	Switch to tag 1–12
super + ctrl + number	Toggle tag
super + shift + number	Move window to tag
super + space / shift + space	Cycle layouts
super + Return	Terminal
super + d / r	Rofi drun / run
super + f / m / ctrl+space	Fullscreen / maximize / float
super + shift + c	Close window
super + ctrl + r	Reload config
super + shift + q	Quit Pinnacle
Print	grim screenshot

🧪 Troubleshooting

Symptom	Cause & fix
`module 'pinnacle' not found`	lua 5.5 spawning instead of 5.4 — install the `~/.bin/lua` shim and prepend it to PATH
`PINNACLE_GRPC_SOCKET was not set`	export it from the live PID (see scripts)
`socket:connect: Connection refused`	stale corpse socket — use PID-based discovery or `ls -t`, and `rm` the corpse
clicks do nothing	two waybar instances — `pkill -9 waybar`, start one
config change "not applying"	waybar only reads files at startup — restart it