xfce4-wayland-kbdstate-plugin

An xfce4-panel plugin that shows the current keyboard layout as a flag, built for native Wayland.

The stock xfce4-xkb-plugin relies on X11 / libxklavier and does nothing under a native Wayland session. This plugin instead reads keyboard state directly through the Wayland wl_seat / wl_keyboard protocol and xkbcommon.

Compatibility

The plugin uses only the core Wayland protocol (wl_seat / wl_keyboard) and xkbcommon — nothing compositor-specific — so it is not tied to any particular Wayland compositor.

The panel itself must run as a native Wayland client (GDK_BACKEND=wayland).

Testing status across Wayland compositors that host xfce4-panel:

Compositor	Family	Status
labwc	wlroots · stacking	✅ Tested
Wayfire	wlroots · stacking	❔ Untested
Hikari	wlroots · stacking	❔ Untested
Sway	wlroots · tiling	❔ Untested
Hyprland	wlroots · tiling	❔ Untested
River	wlroots · tiling	❔ Untested
niri	wlroots · tiling	❔ Untested
dwl	wlroots · tiling	❔ Untested
Cage	wlroots · kiosk	❔ Untested
cosmic-comp	Smithay	❔ Untested

All listed compositors implement wlr-layer-shell, which xfce4-panel uses to dock. GNOME (Mutter) is not listed because it does not implement layer-shell; full desktops like KDE Plasma normally use their own panel. Reports for any untested compositor are welcome.

Features

• Shows the active keyboard layout as a small flag icon, with a text fallback for layouts that have no bundled flag.
• Neon #ff4d55 glow around the flag while Caps Lock is on.
• Written in C++20, no X11 dependency.
• Styling lives in a separate wayland-kbdstate.css, loaded at runtime — it can be tweaked without rebuilding the plugin.
• meson-driven install, including a helper target to relaunch the panel as a native Wayland client.
• Bundled flags: us, gb, ru, ua, de, fr, es, it, pl, cz, tr, nl.

Requirements

A C++20 compiler, meson, ninja, pkg-config, and the development packages for gtk+-3.0, libxfce4panel-2.0, libxfce4ui-2, wayland-client and xkbcommon.

Debian / Ubuntu

sudo apt install build-essential g++ meson ninja-build pkg-config \
  libgtk-3-dev libxfce4panel-2.0-dev libxfce4ui-2-dev \
  libwayland-dev libxkbcommon-dev

Fedora

sudo dnf install gcc-c++ meson ninja-build pkgconf-pkg-config \
  gtk3-devel xfce4-panel-devel libxfce4ui-devel \
  wayland-devel libxkbcommon-devel

Arch Linux

sudo pacman -S --needed base-devel meson ninja \
  gtk3 xfce4-panel libxfce4ui wayland libxkbcommon

openSUSE

sudo zypper install gcc-c++ meson ninja pkgconf-pkg-config \
  gtk3-devel xfce4-panel-devel libxfce4ui-devel \
  wayland-devel libxkbcommon-devel

On other distributions, install the equivalents of the packages listed above.

Build & install

meson setup build --prefix=/usr
meson compile -C build
sudo meson install -C build

meson install installs the plugin module, the flag images, the stylesheet and the .desktop file.

Then restart xfce4-panel as a native Wayland client (from inside your Wayland session, without sudo):

xfce4-panel -q
setsid -f env GDK_BACKEND=wayland xfce4-panel >/dev/null 2>&1

If a build/ directory is left over from an older checkout, recreate it: rm -rf build (or meson setup --wipe build).

Limitations

Click-to-switch from the panel is not implemented yet; it is planned for later and would require a compositor-side helper.

License

GPL-2.0-or-later — see LICENSE. The bundled flag icons are trivial geometric renderings of national flags and carry no separate licensing.