Jonas Ådahl released Wayland-Protocols 1.37 as the newest update to this defined set of Wayland protocols. With the new release there are three new protocols added plus various other maintenance items addressed within the Wayland-Protocols repository.

The first new protocol is xdg-toplevel-icon, which allows associating an icon with a top-level window. Matthias Klumpp argued the case for the xdg-toplevel-icon protocol earlier this year within [1]this merge request . The points raised were better handling multi-window apps, non multi-window apps sometimes have multiple processes with different icons, some apps do not have a desktop-entry file installed for indicating the desired icon, and other edge cases.

There are implementations of this xdg-toplevel-icon protocol already found for Qt, KDE KWin, SDL, and Gamescope.

The other two new protocols are ext-image-capture-source and ext-image-copy-capture that allow for capturing the pixel content of outputs and top-level windows. These protocols have been in the works the past two years and succeed a four year old "cursor spy" protocol attempt. Wlroots, WayVNC, and Grim have code ready for using these new protocols.

More details on the Wayland Protocols 1.37 changes via the [2]mailing list announcement .



[1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/269

[2] https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2024-August/043774.html