Contributing to Leftwm Tips and Tricks

Developing Tips and Tricks

Developing on a window manager can be a bit tricky. It is hard to see the output of the executable you are building, if you introduce a bug it can be hard to revert. This page is meant to capture some of the tips and tricks the LeftWM team uses so if you want to contribute you can use them too.

Running more than one Xorg session.

You can switch back and forth between a different xorg session that is running something else like gnome by using Ctrl+Alt+F[1-12]

1. boot into gnome
2. Ctrl+Alt+F[1-12] to get back to a terminal session
3. login and change the DISPLAY ENV to something like export DISPLAY=:2
4. boot LeftWM Now you can switch back and forth between LeftWM and gnome

Using Xephyr instead of switching tty

if you prefer not to switch tty you can use a tool called Xephyr. This tool allows you to run an embedded X session, aka a wm in a window. To use it first run Xephyr -br -ac -noreset -screen 1920x1200 :1. replace the value after -screen with the resolution you want the session to run in, if you are using a resolution bigger then the window it is contained it it will crop of anything that doesnt fit. If you want it to close after you exit out of the window manager running in it, remove the -noreset. To run leftwm in this X session run DISPLAY=:1 leftwm in a termial. if you changed the :1 in the Xephyr command also replace it in the other command.

Environment Functions

To make your life easier once your done coding, adding this function

checkleft() {
  if ! cargo fmt ; then
    echo "FMT failed"
    exit 1
  fi

  if ! cargo test; then
    echo "Test failed"
    exit 1
  fi

  if ! cargo clippy --all-targets --all-features ; then
    echo "Clippy failed"
    exit 1
  fi

  if ! git add -A $1 ; then
    echo "Add failed"
    exit 1
  fi

  if ! git status ; then
    echo "Status failed"
    exit 1
  fi

  git commit -S -m "$2"
}

to your ~/.bashrc and running it will automatically run all the cargo checks and commit the specified files to git. It assumes you have a gpg-key, remove -S flag from git commit if not. Example usage:

# Example, adds all of src/, Cargo.toml, and Cargo.lock to be committed.
# You can pass anything that would go to git add -A 
checkleft 'src/ Cargo.toml Cargo.lock' 'Commit message'

Note for extended clippy lints use:

cargo clippy -- -W clippy::pedantic -A clippy::must_use_candidate -A clippy::cast_precision_loss -A clippy::cast_possible_truncation -A clippy::cast_possible_wrap -A clippy::cast_sign_loss -A clippy::mut_mut