kobowm

kobowm is an X window manager written in python using Xlib

Why?

I originally wrote this for a Debian installation on my Kobo Touch (N905C), because any existing window manager I tried lacked some basic functionality for a touch screen device, didn't play well with some of the hardware, was too memory hungry or had other similar issues.

This started after finding Nick Welch's tinywm and reading J. D. Bartlett's article about a simplewm.

I ended up creating this repo on github mostly to give an example to anyone else interested in writing their own wm in python (you are warned: there aren't a lot of resources or examples out there and the python-xlib documentation is pretty much terrible)

Using it

If you are interested in the multiboot debian installation on the kobo touch you can read about marek's work on mobileread and/or download my image containing kobowm and some changes from dropbpx.

If you want to run it on another system you'll likely have to read and edit the source (for example some absolute paths), meet the requirements and edit your ~/.xinitrc file to execute kobowm.sh

All hard-coded values should be inside the utils.py file and there is no configuration of any kind. I apologize for this, bus as said I made it for the purpose of being simple and run on my device.

What's inside and features

Kobowm launches 4 applications when starting, never closing them and treating their windows differently from the others:

• launcher.py: a simple applications launcher that reads every .desktop file in the /usr/share/applications/ directory and sorts out any app it's not sure it can run. Also has a simple json cache, if you want to refresh it press the button in the top-right corner
• dock.py: an always-visible dock to the bottom of the screen that emulates key presses that the wm will catch or launches simple scripts for wifi, sdcard, usb and suspension. It also contain a battery percentage and status indicator.
• notif*.py a notification server that receives notifications and asks the wm to show and hide them, see requirements for the 2 differents implementation
• matchbox-keyboard, which is assumed to be installed

Kobowm has only a small set of features, it will:

• resize every window to take all the screen (minus the space occupied by the dock)
• keep track of an active window (the only one visible at any given time, except the apps mentioned in the previous list)
• keep track and manage transient and non-transient windows, cycle through the latter with F1
• show/hide the virtual keyboard and redirect it's key event to the active window (toggle with F2)
• launch an xterm instance (launch with F3)
• kill the current active window and go back to the empty screen, or the window the one destroyed was transient for (with F4)
• show/hide the latest notification (with F9)
• exit (with the power-off button or F12)
• show/hide the launcher (with the launch1 button or the F11)
• keep the log of the current and the last session (in the data directory)

Requirements

• python-xlib to communicate with the X server
• Tkinter used by the launcher, dock and notif* applications
• pydbus and it's requirements, if you use notifdbs for a notification server compatible with the org.freedesktop.Notifications specification (you can send notifications using the command notify-send for example)
• pyzmq if you use notifszmq for a notification server based on the zmq protocol (you can send notifications to it executing notifszmq.py with title, body and optionally timeout as arguments)
• matchbox-keyboard a virtual keyboard

It has been tested with python 2.7 and a little with python 3.6 but should work fine with the latter as well

Also, it has 2 different notification servers to choose from because pydbus has proved to be challenging to use reliably on Debian Jessie, which is installed on my Kobo Touch, and that's why I made one with zmq to use with some scripts I have.

Licence and Attribution

The icons included (in the icons/ folder) come from the Adwaita Icon Theme, part of the GNOME Project, licenced under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0

This work as well is licenced under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0. United States License. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California 94105, USA.

Please link to the this project page where available.