Tutorial 01. Window splitting

bug.n – dynamic window manager (dwm)

Launching

Instructions for launching bug.n can be found here: Installation.

Introduction

Using bug.n can be done in pure keyboard control or through some extra mouse handling. See the Default_hotkeys for what are the default bindings. They are used in this tutorial.

Window model

For this tutorial, we will use git-bash (https://git-for-windows.github.io/), since the target audience is programmers and most programmers are already very familiar with VIM and git. Git bash comes with VIM installed, so you can try it out for yourself. Further a lot of users work with terminals and lots of them, and it directly shows a use case which will be helpful to a lot of us. Start bug.n by executing the bug.n exe file, and then launch git bash. It will look something like this:

Now lets open VIM installed in git bash in the git-bash window, as we will use that for demonstration of the windowing capabilities.

Lets open a second Window (Window_2) and see what happens.

Existing windows are pushed upon a stack to the right of the screen. We will come back to the meaning of stack, and master later. For now just assume that the Window on the right is Master and the window on the left is stack. If you open more windows, the newest window will become the master. The previous windows will be put on the stack. As a result, in this current configuration, you will have only 1 large master Window, and several smaller windows in stack, looking something like this:

Two Windows opened:

Three Windows opened:

Four Windows opened:

Part of the window

In the default configuration, bug.n hides the default title bar of any window currently opened as best as possible. As a result, you can use the maximum screen real estate possible. It displays a thin bar at the top, which in turn consists of 4 main parts:

1. Tags: Tags are like virtual desktop, and each tag can hold multiple windows together.
2. Current tiling mode: This displays the current configuration (Monocole). bug.n has a number of other modes, that we will discuss in upcoming tutorials.
3. Title bar: This displays the name of the application, as well as the name of the current file.
4. Info bar: displays the time, and date.

Resetting and quitting

As you learn the ins and outs of how bug.n works, if you have a lot of applications/ fancy GUIs opened and as we work to make bug.n resolve edge cases better, and make it more stable, you may find that its not behaving as expected. The easiest way to get it working is to reset bug.n to its default configuration.

To reset bug.n cleanly use the following hotkey: WinCtrlR

To quit bug.n cleanly use the following hotkey: WinCtrlQ

Sources

• Tutorial: github.com/alphaCTzo7G/bug.n
• Basic documentation: github.com/fuhsjr00/bug.n/doc