dwm - dynamic window manager

dwm is an extremely fast, small, and dynamic window manager for X.

Preview

Features & Patches

• clickable statusbar: Adds the ability to signal a status monitor program such as dwmblocks.
• stacker: Provides utilities for managing the client stack.
• swallow: If a program run from a terminal, it temporarily takes its place to save space.
• xresources: Allows to handle settings from Xresources.
• removeborder: Remove the border when there is only one window visible.
• fullscreen: Applies the monocle layout with the focused client on top and hides the bar.
• vanitygaps: Adds (inner) gaps between client windows and (outer) gaps between windows and the screen edge in a flexible manner.
• notitle: Doesn't show the title.
• shiftview: Increment or decrement the selected tag.
• hide_vacant_tags: Prevents dwm from drawing tags with no clients.
• alpha: Allow dwm to have translucent bars, while keeping all the text on it opaque.
• actualfullscreen: Actually toggle fullscreen for a window, instead of toggling the status bar and the monocle layout.
• cyclelayouts: Cycles through all available layouts using MOD-CTRL-period.
• xrdb: Allows dwm to read colors from xrdb (.Xresources) at run time.

Requirements

In order to build dwm you need the Xlib header files.

Installation

Edit config.mk to match your local setup (dwm is installed into the /usr/local namespace by default).

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

make clean install

Running

Add the following line to your .xinitrc to start dwm using startx:

exec dwm

In order to connect dwm to a specific display, make sure that the DISPLAY environment variable is set correctly, e.g.:

DISPLAY=foo.bar:1 exec dwm

(This will start dwm on display :1 of the host foo.bar.)

In order to display status info in the bar, you can do something like this in your .xinitrc:

while xsetroot -name "`date` `uptime | sed 's/.*,//'`"
do
  sleep 1
done &
exec dwm

Configuration

The configuration of dwm is done by creating a custom config.h and (re)compiling the source code.