DWM, one of the most efficient window managers

I've been using very lightweight window managers for a few years now. I started with flux box, then OpenBox when installing the distribution Crunchbang, from this I went to xmonad and finally, DWM, the window manager on which Xmonad is based. In fact, Xmonad is a DWM clone written in Haskell instead of C.

That said, I think I've tried quite a few managers to come to the conclusion (personal, of course) that DWM is undoubtedly the best of all, especially in terms of efficiency and customizability. In this article I will try to explain step by step how to install it and make a short introduction to its use.

Installation

In this case, DWM will not be installed in the conventional way via apt, we will directly clone your repository, for this:

$git clone http://git.suckless.org/dwm

Once downloaded, we get into the directory. The most important file in terms of configuration is config.def.h. All modifications will be made in said file. Be careful, this file is the one that comes by default, in order to compile it is necessary that the file is called config.h. Once we run make, he will take care of creating it if it doesn't exist.

Before continuing, you might want to install a few tools, such as dmenu, which will allow to launch any program. For this we execute:

sudo apt-get install suckless-tools

Changes to make before compiling

Before compiling, it would be ideal to at least change which terminal we want DWM to execute when pressing ALT + Shift + Enter. For this we modify in the file config.def.h, (or config.h if you have already created the copy) the following line:

static const char * termcmd [] = {"st", NULL};

By your preferred terminal, in my case Terminator:

static const char * termcmd [] = {"terminator", NULL};

There is still something else to do before installing. Create a DWM session that allows us to execute it when entering the system. We will need a file that we will call dwm.desktop and we will place in / usr / share / xsessions, the content should be as follows:

[Desktop Entry] Encoding = UTF-8 Name = Dwm-personalized Comment = Dynamic window manager Exec = dwm-personalized Icon = dwm.png Type = XSession

In turn, we will create a script that will be executed when entering this session, called dwm-personalized to which we will give execution permissions and its content will be the execution of all the programs that we want to execute at startup. Mine for example is:

#! / bin / bash # setting keyboard layout /usr/share/X11/xkb/rules/base.lst setxkbmap us intl xset + fp / usr / share / fonts / local xset fp rehash nm-applet & parcellite & xfce4-volumed & #Set status bar & start DWM dwmstatus & exec dwm

The script should be saved in / usr / bin with execute permissions:

chmod + x dwm-personalized

Build and install

Now, inside the directory where DWM is located, we compile and install:

sudo make clean install

After this, we exit the current window manager and enter with DWM.

User's guide

Once inside, with Alt + Shitf + Enter the terminal defined above will be executed. The basic commands are

- [Shift] + [Alt] + [Enter] - Launch the terminal
- [Alt] + [p] - Launch dmenu
- [Alt] + number from 1 to 9 - move between the different labels (or desktops)
- [Shift] + [Alt] + number - Move the window to the indicated number
- [Alt] + [Shift] + c - Close the current window

There are 3 types of layout by default, tiled ([Alt] + t), Monocle ([Alt] + m) that shows a window full screen, and we can navigate between them with [Alt] + j or [Alt] + k, and finally Floating, to move and resize the windows to our liking.

All keyboard shortcuts are in the file config.def.h, and that is where we will declare the new ones.

If you prefer to use the windows key instead of [Alt], just modify the line

#define MODKEY Mod1Mask

by

#define MODKEY Mod4Mask

and recompile.

Modifying DWM at will

There are many patches that can be applied to DWM on its official website (http://dwm.suckless.org/patches/). However, one of the most striking, coloring the status bar, is not available for the latest version (6.1). I have tried writing one and it currently works quite well. Is found in github.com/someone91/myDWM and it's as easy to run as download and type:

git apply dwm-6.1-simplestatuscolor.diff

To use it you need to use dwmstatus and format the state as follows.

The patch has 7 colors, to indicate the color to use, you must write the character \ xCL at the end of the text to be colored, where CL is a digit from 01 to 07. For example, using the first three colors:

status = smprintf ("L:% s \ x01 A:% s \ x02 U:% s% s \ x03", avgs, tmar, tmutc, tmbln);

It will color L:% s with color 1, L:% s with color 2, and U:% s% s with color 3.

If you want to know the programming details about the patch you can consult this article.

Final comments

I hope you liked the article and are encouraged to try this type of window manager. Since I discovered them, I have not used the conventional managers again, and I do not miss them. I leave you a screenshot: