dwm - dynamic window manager

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

This is my patched version of Suckless's (in)famous window manager.

• The top-bar works well with glyphs and emojis.
• Keyboard controlled volume, brightness etc are already patched in.
• Highly recommend to use NerdFonts to properly display glyphs, emojis etc.
• For wallpapers, use feh and source ~/.fehbg & from your .xinitrc
• Default terminal emulator is set as kitty (can be changed in config.h).
• Screenshots using flameshot. Install it using your package manager.

Requirements

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

dmenu, another Suckless utility, is used to launch applications. It is available in most package managers or can be built from source.

You also will need a patched version of libxft as it does not have emoji support baked into it. If you are on Arch Linux, you can get the patched version libxft-bgra-git from the AUR. (i use arch, btw)

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 dwm

Add a dwm.desktop file in your /usr/share/xsessions directory with the following contents if you are using gdm (Gnome Desktop Manager):

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

Or add the following line to your .xinitrc to start dwm if you are using startx:

exec dwm

In order to display status info in the bar, checkout my other repo: dwmblocks You can customize required modules in the top (battery, time, volume etc.) bar by simply editing shell scripts.

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.)

Or, you can use arandr (GUI client for xrandr) to configure your displays.

Configuration

If you want to further customize this version, it is done by creating a custom config.h and (re)compiling the source code.

To-Do

• Add clickablity to the top bar by applying appropriate patches.
• Add a better notification management system.
• Add a compositor for transparency.

Resources

The documentation for dwm and all its patches is extremely good.

Luke Smith, Mental Outlaw and DT are great people with amazing tutorials.