What is wayland-tracer

wayland-tracer is a protocol dumper for Wayland. It can be used to
trace what's on the wire between the compositor and client, which can
be useful for debugging and is superior to WAYLAND_DEBUG in some
aspects. It can dump raw binary data or interpret data to readable
format if XML protocol definitions are provided.

Building wayland-tracer

Building wayland-tracer is quite simple, it doesn't have many
dependencies. Only expat is need for parsing protocol.

    $ git clone https://github.com/dboyan/wayland-tracer.git
    $ cd wayland-tracer
    $ ./autogen.sh --prefix=PREFIX
    $ make
    $ make install

and you have wayland-tracer.

Using wayland-tracer

To use wayland-tracer, you first need to have a running wayland
compositor. The most basic use is:

    $ wayland-tracer -- PROGRAM [ARGS ...]

which launches the program specified and dumps binary data. If you have
XML protocol files and want wayland-tracer to interpret wire data to
readable format, you can use -d parameter to specifiy XML protocol files
(at least wayland core protocol is needed):

    $ wayland-tracer -d wayland.xml [-d more-protocols] \
    >     -- PROGRAM [ARGS ...]

wayland-tracer will interpret the protocol according to xml definition.

For more uses (such as server-mode, output redirecting, etc.), see the
output of `wayland-tracer -h` or `man wayland-tracer`.