dwm
dwm is a dynamic window manager for Xorg. It manages windows in tiled, stacked, and full-screen layouts, as well as many others with the help of optional patches. Layouts can be applied dynamically, optimizing the environment for the application in use and the task being performed. dwm is extremely lightweight and fast, written in C and with a stated design goal of remaining under 2000 source lines of code. It provides multihead support for xrandr and Xinerama.
Contents
- 1 Installation
- 2 Starting dwm
- 3 Configuration
- 4 Basic usage
- 5 Tips and tricks
- 6 Troubleshooting
- 7 See also
Installation
Install the dwm package. Alternatively, make changes to the source code, then compile dwm using ABS or the dwm-gitAUR package for the development version.
Starting dwm
Select Dwm from the menu in a display manager of choice.
Alternatively, to start dwm with startx append the following to ~/.xinitrc
:
exec dwm
Configuration
Customization
dwm is configured at compile-time by editing some of its source files, namely config.h
. For detailed information on these settings see the included, well commented config.def.h
as well as the customisation section on the dwm website.
Patches
The official website has a number of patches that can add extra functionality to dwm. These patches primarily make changes to the dwm.c
file but also make changes to the config.h
file where appropriate. For information on applying patches, see Patching in ABS.
Status bar
See the dwmstatus section on the dwm website. Also see the #Statusbar configuration section.
Use pacman
You should create a package using a PKGBUILD so that pacman is aware of the package.
Applying changes
After making any desired changes and installing the updated package, restart dwm in order to apply the changes.
Basic usage
Consult the dwm tutorial for information on basic dwm usage. Additionally see dwm(1).
Tips and tricks
st keybindings conflict
The default terminal for dwm is st. Be default, st uses Mod1+Ctrl+C
for copy, but dwm uses this same key combination to kill a program. You should change this shortcut in either dwm or st such that st is not killed when attempting to copy text.
Statusbar configuration
Dwm reads the name of the root window and redirects it to the statusbar. The root window is the window within which all other windows are drawn and arranged by the window manager. Like any other window, the root window has a title/name, but it is usually undefined because the root window always runs in the background.
The information that you want dwm to show in the statusbar should be defined with xsetroot -name ""
command in ~/.xinitrc
or ~/.xprofile
(if you are using a display manager). For example:
xsetroot -name "Thanks for all the fish!"
Dynamically updated information should be put in a loop which is forked to background - see the example below:
# Statusbar loop while true; do xsetroot -name "$( date +"%F %R" )" sleep 1m # Update time every minute done & # Autostart section pcmanfm & exec dwm
In this case the date is shown in ISO 8601 format and PCManFM is launched at startup.
More examples of statusbars are included on the suckless wiki.
Conky statusbar
Conky can be printed to the statusbar with xsetroot -name
:
(conky | while read LINE; do xsetroot -name "$LINE"; done) & exec dwm
To do this, conky needs to be told to output text to the console only. The following is a sample conkyrc for a dual core CPU, displaying several usage statistics:
conky.config = { out_to_console = true, out_to_x = false, background = false, update_interval = 2, total_run_times = 0, use_spacer = 'none', }; conky.text = [[ $mpd_smart :: ${cpu cpu1}% / ${cpu cpu2}% ${loadavg 1} ${loadavg 2 3} :: ${acpitemp}c :: $memperc% ($mem) :: ${downspeed eth0}K/s ${upspeed eth0}K/s :: ${time %a %b %d %I:%M%P} ]];
For icons and color options, see dzen.
Restart dwm without logging out or closing programs
For restarting dwm without logging out or closing applications, change or add a startup script so that it loads dwm in a while loop, see below:
while true; do # Log stderror to a file dwm 2> ~/.dwm.log # No error logging #dwm >/dev/null 2>&1 done
dwm can now be restarted without destroying other X windows by pressing the usual Mod-Shift-Q combination.
It is a good idea to place the above startup script into a separate file, ~/bin/startdwm
for instance, and execute it through ~/.xinitrc
. From this point on, when you wish to end the X session, simply execute killall xinit
, or bind it to a convenient key. Alternatively, you could setup your dwm session script so that it relaunches dwm only if the binary changes. This could be useful in the case where you change a setting or update the dwm code base.
# relaunch DWM if the binary changes, otherwise bail csum=$(sha1sum $(which dwm)) new_csum="" while true do if [ "$csum" != "$new_csum" ] then csum=$new_csum dwm else exit 0 fi new_csum=$(sha1sum $(which dwm)) sleep 0.5 done
Make the right Alt key work as if it were Mod4 (Windows Key)
When using Mod4 (the Super/Windows Key) as the MODKEY
, it may be equally convenient to have the right Alt key (Alt_R
) act as Mod4
. This will allow you to perform otherwise awkward keystrokes one-handed, such as zooming with Alt_R
+Enter
.
First, find out which keycode is assigned to Alt_R
:
xmodmap -pke | grep Alt_R
Then simply add the following to the startup script (e.g. ~/.xinitrc
), changing the keycode 113 if necessary to the result gathered by the previous xmodmap
command:
xmodmap -e "keycode 113 = Super_L" # reassign Alt_R to Super_L xmodmap -e "remove mod1 = Super_L" # make sure X keeps it out of the mod1 group
After doing so, any functions that are triggered by the Super_L
key press will also be triggered by an Alt_R
key press.
Space around font in dwm's bar
By default, dwm's bar adds 2px around the size of the font. To change this, modify the following line in dwm.c
:
bh = dc.h = dc.font.height + 2;
Disable focus follows mouse behaviour
To disable focus follows mouse behaviour comment out the following line in definiton of struct handler in dwm.c
[EnterNotify] = enternotify,
Note that this change can cause some difficulties; the first click on an inactive window will only bring the focus to it. To interact with window contents (buttons, fields etc) you need to click again. Also, if you have several monitors, you may notice that the keyboard focus does not switch to another monitor activated by clicking.
Make some windows start floating
For some windows, such as preferences dialogs, it does not make sense for these windows to be tiled - they should be free-floating instead. For example, to make Firefox's preferences dialog float, add the following to your rules array in config.h
:
{ "Firefox", NULL, "Firefox Preferences", 1 << 8, True, -1 },
Troubleshooting
Fixing misbehaving Java applications
See Java#Non-reparenting window managers for a solution.
Fixing the extra topbar that does not disappear when changing resolution/monitors
When resizing or connecting/disconnecting different monitors there may be a remnant of the topbar stuck on the screen which cannot be removed. To fix this bug, rebuild dwm with this patch.
Fixing gaps around terminal windows
If there are empty gaps of desktop space outside terminal windows, it is likely due to the terminal's font size. Either adjust the size until finding the ideal scale that closes the gap, or toggle resizehints
to False in config.h
:
static Bool resizehints = False; /* True means respect size hints in tiled resizals */
This will cause dwm to ignore resize requests from all client windows, not just terminals. The downside to this workaround is that some terminals may suffer redraw anomalies, such as ghost lines and premature line wraps, among others.
See also
- dwm's official website
- Introduction to dwm video
- dmenu - Simple application launcher from the developers of dwm
- The dwm thread on the forums
- Hacking dwm thread
- Check out the forums' wallpaper thread for a selection of dwm wallpapers
- Show off your dwm configuration forum thread