Window manager hopping - dwm, twm, bspwm

dwm. Dynamic Window Manager. Let's go hardcore!

dwm, together with a bunch of few other lightweight tools are developed by these guys - https://suckless.org/

To say the least I'm deeply impressed how tiny, comfortable and snappy this thing is. 

At first, I was little skeptical about tiling window managers, because we all used to floating ones. But hell, how good and fast they are! It really shifts your user experience from being constantly distracted by different things to be entirely focused on doing what you actually wanted to do. Such tiling window managers are unleashing the true power of keyboard. You can still use your mouse, but really it's order of magnitude faster to do everything by keyboard. An did I tell you it's tiny as grain of rice which means memory and CPU efficient? :)

In order to not get yourself lost at the beginning, make sure you'll install not only dwm, but also few additional packages (what we need the most is dmenu - it's part of suckless-tools):

apt install dwm sterm suckless-tools

Here are some useful shortcuts you'll need at the beginning:

Alt + Shift + Enter	Starts a new terminal window
Alt + P	Opens a dmenu (launcher). Whatever you'll run will be put to the top of a "master" (pile of windows on the left hand side). The existing window from "master" will be moved to "stack" (right hand side plie of windows)
Alt + i / d	Increases or decreases the number of windows in "master" (left hand side half of screen)
Alt + h / l	Resize the split between "master" and "stack" and
Alt + j / k	Changes current focus to the next / prev window
Alt + 1 .. 9	Changes current workspace to #1 .. #9 (they call it a tag)
Shift + Alt + 1 .. 9	Moves the current window to a workspace #1 .. #9

 

I strongly advise you to go visit the official tutorial to get that to understand what is the main idea behind dwm and why it's doing what it's doing - https://dwm.suckless.org/tutorial/

 

Things I did after installing dwm:

 

1) had to change background colors used by dolphin (gui file manager), because by default it was using plasma dark color with dark unreadable fonts.

2) added some additional lines to ~/.xsessionrc as the KDE version in Debian doesn't clear all its processes behind:

# if we're switching to dwm we don't need any KDE processess any longer
if [[ "$DESKTOP_SESSION" -eq "dwm" ]] ; then
  xrandr --output HDMI-1 --mode 1920x1080
  sudo killall kinit polkitd kdeconnectd kactivitymanagerd kded5 packagekitd kglobalaccel5 kdeinit5 klauncher
fi

3) the default st terminal is just awesome, when it comes to memory footprint. But it doesn't look very pretty and it's like inviting you to change it. I forked it and finally implemented the putty-like copy&paste behavior I was missing so much since I moved to Linux  - https://github.com/kha84/st/

 

 

 

(screenshots are made with scrot)

 

twm. Old as hell. But still useful

I used to use twm a lot in my earlier days with linux. Really. But now it looks so outdated and so hard to use. You can think of it as of some archeological museum exhibit item: you can admire it's still there and working, even play a bit with it, but to use it on a daily basis - nah, just skip that part altogether.

 

  

awesome

tbc

bspwm

tbc