dewm

Forked

dewm is a pure Go autotiling window manager. You may find it somewhat similar to dwm or wmii, but has some ideas of its own.

This dewm was forked from Kamil (Rollcat)'s which in turn was forked from Dave MacFarlane's dewm, which was written in literate style, using lmt. The fork dropped the original Markdown sources, heavy refactoring and cleanup was done, bugs were fixed, some features dropped, more added, arbitrary changes made.

Goals

Based off of the dewm, this fork seeks to:

1. Be runnable on the mac via XQuartz
2. Provide multiple monitor support (pending)
3. Provide multiple screens per monitor

Basics

dewm is a very simple window manager that seeks to arranges winows on a screen automaticly freeing the user from the need to keep track of or position windows. Most users probobly never has experienced a window manager like this being use to needing to move and size windows manually. In fact, the current state of computing has resulted in most users having so many windows open on the screen that windows actually get lost.

Windows are arranged using three different layouts, Column, Focus, and Monical.

• Column - All windows displayed in one vertical column
• Focus - Primary window taking most of the screen on the left with a column of other windows on the right.
• Monical - Stacks all the apps on top of one another with the primare window on top. All windows are full screen.

Keybindings then allow you to move windows around in layout specific ways.

Keybindings

These keybindings are currently hardcoded, but may one day be configurable. Note, if running on Mac OS X, be sure to set the option key to act as an alt key in XQuarts preferences.

Window Management

• Alt-right/Alt-left/Alt-Up/Alt-Down move the current window position.
• Alt-N create a new column
• Alt-D delete any empty columns

Layouts

• Alt-c - switch to column layout
• Alt-f - switch to focus layout
• Alt-m - switch to monical layout

Other

• Alt-Enter spawn an xterm
• Alt-Shift-Enter spawn an st
• Alt-Q close the current window
• Alt-Shift-Q destroy the current window
• Ctrl-Alt-Shift-Q quit dewm

Command Line Interface

If your keybindings clash or you just can't remember and use them, the command line interface can be used to issue all the same actions. These can also be used to script control of the window manager. The window manager listens to a Named Pipe for commands. Each command is on one line and if there are parameters it is separated by a :.

The Named Pipe will be in the tmp drive and has an extintion matching the x-windows display number.

echo left >> /tmp/dewm-commands.0

You can also use the window manager binary to send messages by using the --command flag. Here is an example of sending a command to dewm running on display :1 (not the default) which will send commands to /tmp/dewm-commands.1

DISPLAY=:1 ; ./dewm --command 'tag:1'

Acceptable commands are in the table below.

Command	Param	Description
add		Add a new column
clean		Clean up columns
quit		Try to quit nicely
exit		Forcfully stop program
term		Open a XTerm
open	app	Open <app>
focus		Switch to the focus view
monical		Switch to the monical view
column		Switch to th ecolumn view
tag	number	Push the top app to screen <number>
view	number	Switch to screen <number>
left		Move apps left
down		Move apps down
up		Move apps up
right		Move apps right

Differences from fork

• Updated to support modern (1.17) golang specs (go.mod…)
• Added Focus layout
• VIM arrow keys convented to actual arrow keys
  • Sorry, I'm a dvorak keyboard user, vim arrows are cool but do not actually help me
• Command Line Interface
• Multiple workspace (planned)
  • may be working
• Multi Monitor support (planned)
  • Currently assumes one virtual monitor