Waybar IPC's reliance on sway

[NealC]

Hello All! I don't do this kind of thing very often, so please be gentle with me ;-)

I, like many others, would like to autohide some of my waybars (I know this is a feature request, but that's for a different discussion ;-) ). I use Wayfire, so please keep your insults to yourselves ;-)

I found a program called waycorner (https://github.com/AndreasBackx/waycorner) which can run an external script when the mouse hits a hotspot. I thought I could use this with swaymsg to set the bar mode, but it appears I was wrong.

I am somewhat 'out of my wheelhouse' here, but after much fiddling and grepping of the waybar source, it appears that waybar does not only rely on the swaybar IPC protocol, but on sway itself. I think I can understand this to an extent - I suppose it saves implementing a full IPC protocol into waybar - but this seems to take away somewhat from waybars claim to be a 'highly customizable Wayland bar for Sway and Wlroots based compositors'. It is by definition_less_ customisable for Wayland/wlroots compositors than sway (and sway has swaybar, after all...).

I certainly found it confusing that the option to enable IPC is;
"ipc": true
and not (eg),
"swayipc": true

Would it not be better to implement a true IPC connection (directly to waybar) that could be used regardless of WM? Given the rusty state of my C/Cpp skills (learnt 30 years ago at university, hardly used since) this is currently beyond me but, depending on the communities thoughts, I may be able to put some time into it.

What's y'all's opinion?
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