It's just an environment variable. If you can't set an environment variable then power user tools probably are not for you.

>It's just an environment variable.

Sure. Which needs to be in the env sway gets passed. Which makes for some seriously ugly wrapper script needed, just to pass the stupid variable.

>If you can't set an environment variable then power user tools probably are not for you.

I think you're missing the point. It'll be a shame if sway 1.0 is released like this.

Sway 1.0 will have a different means of configuring the keyboard, but only incedentally. I think that there's nothing wrong with the environment variable approach _or_ with writing scripts.

On i3, to reconfigure the keyboard you just edit the config file and in your terminal type "i3-msg" reload.

Can you do the same with sway without restarting it?

i3 doesn't have any keyboard configuration options, so... unless you're just talking about keybindings, which you can totally reconfigure in Sway and reload without restarting. What you can't do in either is set the keymap on the fly without restarting. This is something you can do on i3 but it's an X thing, unrelated to the i3 config. On sway you can configure multiple keymaps ahead of time and switch between them without restarting, but cannot change the configured keymaps on the fly.

Changing your keymap at runtime is something we hope to have in sway 1.0. We'd also like to support multiple keyboards with different keymaps and even configuring which keymap you use on specific windows.

Yes, I was talking about keybindings, and it's reassuring that Sway is just as capable as i3 in this area.

I'm looking forward to giving Sway and Wayland a try.