Wayfire is constantly improving and new interesting animations are constantly pushing the bar. This time, we introduce a new animation part of wayfire-plugins-extra extra-animations plugin. It is called melt, and has an interesting story. Long story short, it was created by an AI LLM. Spoiler alert: It was Google ‘AI Mode’. I fed it the current fire shader and asked it to make an improved version. It spit back a shader which I massaged into an instance that wayfire could consume. In addition to the distortion there was a lot of code to render a gradient of color to simulate some fire, but I felt the distorted surfaces were spot on for a wayfire open/close animation. So I ripped the gradient out and left it as a shader that melts the view to/from existence.

Additionally, a long time wayfire contributor Daniel Kondor filed this issue. At first I dismissed it because the squeezimize shader is quite difficult to work with in its current state. However I am really glad that someone brought this up because 1) it pushed me to improve squeezimize shader and 2) Daniel wrote a companion shader which allows the squeezimize animation to reasonably handle left and right minimize targets. Before, it only handled top and bottom panels. Of course all of this text can be boring and cumbersome, so here are some videos:

Melt Animation

Improved Squeezimize