bspwm is a tiling window manager that represents windows as the leaves of a full binary tree.
It only responds to X events, and the messages it receives on a dedicated socket.
bspc is a program that writes messages on bspwm's socket.
bspwm doesn't handle any keyboard or pointer inputs: a third party program (e.g. sxhkd) is needed in order to translate keyboard and pointer events to bspc invocations.
The outlined architecture is the following:
PROCESS SOCKET sxhkd --------> bspc <------> bspwm
This fork includes extensive security improvements:
- Memory safety: Buffer overflow fixes, bounds checking, integer overflow protection
- Resource limits: Maximum tree depth, string size limits, recursion prevention
- Input validation: Proper sanitization of all user inputs
- Secure coding: No format string vulnerabilities, proper null termination
- Denial of service prevention: Protection against infinite loops and excessive allocations
See CHANGELOG.md versions 0.10.0-0.10.4 for detailed security fixes.
Despite extensive security hardening, performance remains excellent:
- Query operations: ~3.8% faster than 0.9.10
- Memory usage: 2.4 MB RSS (11% less than original)
- Responsiveness: Feels snappier due to eliminated edge cases
- Protection cost: <5% overhead on tree operations, prevents crashes
The security fixes actually improve common operations while preventing pathological cases that could freeze the window manager.
The default configuration file is $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/bspwm/bspwmrc: this is
simply a shell script that calls bspc.
Keyboard and pointer bindings are defined with sxhkd.
Example configuration files can be found in the examples directory.
bash make sudo make install
Dependencies: libxcb xcb-util xcb-util-keysyms xcb-util-wm
- Subreddit: r/bspwm
- IRC:
#bspwmonirc.libera.chat - Matrix: #bspwm:matrix.org