l3pp4rd / dwm

Local fork of dwm - Dynamic Window Manager

My customized DWM window manager

Mainly as an addition it includes some patches like:

• systray (patched)
• dzen2 status bar (has an update to dwm.c in order to toggle visibility)
• restart with recompilation support while keeping all active windows running

Same as original it may be the fastest WM available, hackable masterpiece from suckless.org. The reason why I chose it, is because this is the original implementation of idea, later followed by Xmonad, Awesome, I3 and other wms. And it is the lightest of them all, plus if you are a hacker you are free to see the whole source in a single file in 2000 lines of code, which is directly using Xorg X11 functions.

Screenshot

Requirements

• Xlib, Xft - X FreeType interface library.
• Xinerama lib is optional
• My dotfiles contains necessary scripts to run dzen2 status and other tools, which has a bunch of deps too. You can see what is being launched in xinitrc

Installation

Edit config.mk to match your local setup

Afterwards enter the following command to build and install dwm (if necessary as root):

make clean install

A start script (lets name it dwm-personalized) for dwm could look like:

#!/bin/sh

DZEN2_STATUS="$HOME/.dotfiles/scripts/dwm_status"

setxkbmap -option ctrl:nocaps & # disable caps lock
xsetroot -name "" &             # we have dzen2 status bar, set main WM window title to none

if [ !-f "$DZEN2_STATUS" ]; then
    DZEN2_STATUS="echo 'dzen2 status is unavailable' | dzen2 -x 780 -y 0 -w 710 -h 20 -ta 'r' -p"
fi

while true; do
    (sleep 0.5 && $DZEN2_STATUS) & # run dzen2 status bar, need to make sure wm loads first

    # start dwm
    dwm > ~/.dwm.log
    # read exit status
    if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
        exit 0 # means exit clean => quit
    elif [ $? -ne 5 ]; then
        mv ~/.dwm.log ~/.dwm.failure.log # a failure occured, save the log, never happened so far
    fi
    # dwm should be recompiled if changes were done
    # kill running processes
    killall dwm_status
done

Do not forget to:

chmod +x dwm-personalized

And in your xinitrc, instead of exec dwm use exec dwm-personalized script. If you want to use a login manager like Slim you will need to create an xsession, at /usr/share/xsession/dwm-personalized.desktop with contents:

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

Also, your executable dwm-personalized should be moved to /usr/bin or /usr/local/bin.