dwm — the dynamic window manager
Yesterday I was a bit bored and wanted to check out a tiling window manager. My choice fell on dwm and I’m totally excited. Gone are the days where I had to rearrange the windows myself.
One interesting point is that dwm is so lightweight that it can only be configured by editing its source code (config.h) and recompile it. Gentoo has a mechanism which allows saving customized config-header files to /etc/portage/savedconfig/. You can enable it by setting the USE-Flag savedconfig.
The most important thing you have to do as an emacs addict is to change the MODIFIER key from Mod1Mask (= Alt) to some other key, like Mod4Mask (= Windows key).
In contrast to e.g. ratpoison, dwm has a small bar on top of the screen which displays a pager, the title of the focused window and everything dwm receives on stdin. I made a script that informs me via the statusbar if I received a message on my instant messenger.
Another cool feature is that you can toggle between tiling and floating mode with a single keystroke.
So to sum it up: dwm is really worth a try.
[...] Filed under: Uncategorized — S @ 19:29:35 +0000 Tags: usability Tassilo Horn’s blog set me off. http://xwinman.org/ is a useful guide to X window managers. dwm is a dynamic window [...]
Usability « The Lumber Room
April 16, 2008 at 5:49 am
can you mail me the script used for notifying any im reception on statusbar?
tia
sudhanshu
Sudhanshu
October 13, 2008 at 9:21 am
Hi Sudhanshu,
I’m sorry, but U don’t have that script anymore. As an alternative I’d recommend to use the notify-send utility which comes with libnotify.
Bye,
Tassilo
Tassilo Horn
October 19, 2008 at 5:53 pm
Sudhanshu, see README
(11:39)-[Darwin@Darwin ~]% cat .xinitrc
wmsetbg ~/pic/screen.jpg
while true
do
echo `top -s1 | grep last`
sleep 1
done | dwm
Darwin
November 29, 2008 at 8:40 am