Wayfire is maturing nicely with an animation infrastructure that makes it relatively easy to create new animations. However, even though wayfire has the nice fire animation, it only has a few other basic ones. Recently, wayfire gained support for a new option type of ‘animation’. This type allows you to select an easing as well as duration. One animation that wayfire users have been talking about for years, is the classic magic lamp minimize animation. And secretly, I’ve been wanting to write this animation. After a comment from a user in wayfire chat about this animation being the only thing missing from their wayifre-dots setup, I figured it was time to try my hand at implementing the effect. I decided to call it ‘squeezimize’, and started coding.

At first, I rendered the view in a loop, scissoring the transformed surface into horizontal lines. This worked ok, but the sigmoid curve seemed to be lost in the math, and worst of all, the implementation was slow. After bouncing around some ideas to make it faster, it seemed the way forward was to write a fragment shader to render the effect in a single pass per frame. After a lot more math and coffee, I came up with this very thing. A simple fragment shader that requires minimum glsl version and only uses basic math. It does not use builtin shader functions other than clamp(). This means it’s fast. And, the shader renders better curves than the slower line by line proof of concept.

TL;DR: Wayfire has a new shader called squeezimize that renders a magic lamp effect. Yes it’s been done, time and time again, but because it’s a single pass shader with very little input, it’s low on resources. After writing squeezimize, I wrote two more animations for wayfire open/close windows, called zap and spin. Now for a video:

EDIT: There are now two more animations, in addition to the above, helix and blinds: