xbell-ringer: a virtual audible X11 bell

[dasyatid1]

So I shifted my Arch Linux desktop system into The Future™ to use PipeWire instead of PulseAudio. And getting my X bell working again turned out to be a bit… off?

So I wrote xbell-ringer to do what I want. And in case what you want is similar enough to what I want, version 0.1.1 is now out publicly, with its tarball available from the tags download page. See the README for more details, but basically it runs as a systemd user service and hooks up the XKB bell to XDG Sound Theme events.

A question I haven't investigated yet: does it make any sense to try to get something like this upstreamed for PipeWire? I'm not sure of the original motivation for the PipeWire X11 bell module to be using libcanberra the way it does, and having all the XSETTINGS parsing in there loaded into the same address space as the audio daemon also sounds like a hairy proposition. That's why I wrote this one to be its own bridge process, but I'm guessing users who are used to tinkering with their desktop audio daemon config might expect it to be available from that vantage point?

Anyway, share and enjoy! Feel free to give feedback in comments and report any issues either there or in the Bitbucket issue tracker.