Introduction
Welcome to this blog where I will be writing about DWM (Dyanmic Window Manager) which is written in C intended to reduce bloat as much as possible giving us a smooth user experience. Configuring DWM can be hard for a few, but the end result is worth it. I recently wanted to try DWM for fun and turned out it was actually a very good experienced that I have switched from Hyprland to DWM permanently. To configur, DWM we have to manually edit the C source code, after the changes we save. Compile it with the make command and then finally quit DWM adn log back in for the changes. If there are any errors with the source code, then DWM won't allow you to log inside the DWM until the error is corrected. So, what I did is i would backup after every stable change I make and in case of there are any errors I would copy the backup file or manually edit them in a tty.
About DWM
DWN is a window manager for X server made by suckless.org a group of programmers working together to make softwares that "suck less". They have made many tools like "st" (suckless terminal/simple terminal), surf (a web browser) and some other "core" programs for a suck less experience.
There are many layout to manage windows like tiled, monocle, floating layout. We can switch the between different layouts using keybinds dynamically to according to the application that we are working with.
How are windows managed
In tiled mode, the windows are stacked above one another as a new wondow is created everytime. Stack in the sense not "literally" stack but the windows act stacked in the memory as in the data structure "stack".
In monocle layout, all the windows are fullscreen and now are literally stacked above each other when they are created.
In the floating layout, it is like what we use in rest of the desktop environments and in Windows. All the newly created windows are floating.
Workspaces/Tags
In DWM, the workspaces are called as "tags". By default, there are 10 tags but we can change them to how much we want. We can also replace them with a logo instead of just numbers.
We can switch between them with shortcut key, ALT + "tag_number". We can also change the keybinds to whatever we feel comfortable.
The red circled is what is called tags
Status Bar
There is a status bar by default in provided by DWM. We can also add our own status bar if we want with "patches" (I'll cover that in the upcoming heading). The status bar is divided into three parts, left part for the tags, middle part for the activity that we are doing like the window name and right one is for custom modules that we would display by script files for everything. By default, there is nothing on the right part
There are many status bars for the left part: slstatus, dwmblocks, dwmblocks with color support and anybar (which allows us to use any bar other than the default one provided by DWM).
Patches
We can add many other features we require by "patching" the main source code. This is one of the most exhausting part of DWM for people who want extra features.
The patches are mostly written by other users by themselves. Patches are nothing but adding extra functionality to the source code.
When applying the patches there is 7/10 chance for a patch error to occur. The error is put into a .rej file with the changes taht are to be made undicated with "+" and "-". We have to manually edit them ourselves and compile the code. We have to add the lines that start with + and delete the line that start with "-".
This is part where most quit because its exhausting.
This is because that the patches are not intelligent enough to make all the changes by itself. They expect some block of code to be there but when there is no code block that the patch is expecting it returns and error and as I said after we edit the file ourselves and if there are errors in teh main source code the DWM won't allow us to get into the DWM.
Bottom Note
There are different Window managers but I really felt that this one was peculiar and thought of writing a blog on it.
There are many window managers that are a fork of this like i3 and bspwm, dwl (which is a wayland fork of dwm) and much more.
You can try and install dwm if you want from the link below
DWM: https://dwm.suckless.org/