Improved Binary Space Window Manager

WARNING: This application is under development and not stable yet.

ibswm is a tiling window manager that represents windows as the leaves of full binary tree. It only manages events sent from X server and messages it received from the socket communication. ibsc is a program that writes messages into the ibswm's socket. This window manager doesn't handle any keyboard or mouse events. You need a third party program (like sxhkd) to communicate informations between your action and the window manager, through ibsc commands.

This project is strongly inspired by bspwm and tries to improve it. It is also entirely written in Rust to enable memory-safety and be able to work with higher performance.

Installation

TODO

Configuration

You can easily configure ibswm behavior using bash file stored into $HOME/.config/ibswm/ibswmrc file. This file is executed directly right after the window manager is booted. It can handle any bash command to start when the window manager is executed. Also, this file is a perfect place to configure the window manager through ibsc command like :

ibsc config window_gap 18
ibsc config focus_follows_pointer true

ibsc monitor

Configure a monitor. To configure a monitor, you must known the monitor ID, given by xrandr --query. You can have an unlimited number of desktops by monitor. By default, if you did not configure a monitor, the window manager will try to detect informations for you. Also, you can give a name to a monitor in order to apply some configuration just for this monitor.

ibsc monitor MONITOR_ID --name NAME --desktops DESKTOP_0 DESKTOP_1 DESKTOP_N

ibsc config

Configure a monitor. Every command listed here can use the --monitor argument to only configure a monitor and not every of them.

Key	Value	Description
window_gap	int	Gap between window on the same desktop.
focus_follows_pointer	bool	Focus when hovering window.

ibsc rule

Configure a rule for a particular application. This command is useful when you want an application to always map a specific monitor, or to be started as float by default.

bspc rule --application git-cola --state STATE --desktop DESKTOP_0

To know which name an application have, you can start your application and execute this command :

xwininfo -root -children

How it works

ibswm works using a binary tree.

TODO: Implement this part of documentation.

Supported protocols and standards

ibswm tries to follow as much as possible the following protocols :

• RandR and Xinerama ;
• EWMH and ICCCM standards ;

Development

To improve this application, you need to install some dependencies into order to test your modification. You'll need the following packages installed into your distribution :

• xserver-xephyr

sudo apt install xserver-xephyr

Now, you can clone the repository and start working on it.

# Start a background process to see your modification.
Xephyr -screen 640x480 +extension RANDR -ac +xinerama :1 &

# Start the window manager and map the display to Xephyr server.
DISPLAY=:1 cargo run -- -vv

# Start an application and map it to Xephyr display.
DISPLAY=:1 alacritty