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An X11 Tiling Window Manager for GNU/Linux and BSD's.

Background

Slacker Window Manager (swm) is an X11 (The X Window System) non-reparenting window manager. Slacker uses Xlib (the original library released by MIT in the mid 1980s) as the library to interact with the X11 protocol, rather than the newer XCB library released in the early 2000's. This is mostly because Xlib is better documented, and I find it historically pleasing to program against.

Table of Contents

Features

  • Extremely light weight, < 250 mb of ram and very fast, minimal dependencies.
  • Tiling window management with floating, master/stack and monocal layouts.
  • Keyboard driven with mouse support.
  • Built in status bar with tags as workspaces.
  • Configured through editing the swm/src/config.c file. Swm relies on being recompiled after changes to its code, this works because it recompiles so fast.
  • Built in program autostart support (doesn't rely on an unwieldly amount of scripts to start programs we all need) found in swm/src/main.c.
  • Multi-monitor support (under development).
  • System tray support.
  • Window gaps (for the ladies)
  • Arbitrarily swapping windows with master window in stack.
  • Horizontally resizing windows
  • Vertically resizing windows
  • Re-write/re-implement the suckless drawable.h FontConfig/XftFont drawing library (it's filthy to read).

Install

Installing and using the window manager release build

# Installs the X11 libraries, dunst, volumeicon-alsa, network-manager, feh, picom,
# for apt-get based systems. (will prompt for sudo)
sudo make init

# Compiles the window manager installs binary, desktop file, picom file, etc.
sudo make install

# Uninstall the window manager and support files
sudo make uninstall

Default Configuration

See the swm/src/config.c file to edit the configuration.

The following programs/fonts should be found on your system

  1. konsole - the terminal emulator (change to what ever you would like)
  2. JetBrains Mono NerdFont - if not found monospace will be used as the fallback
  3. dmenu - The program launcher
const uint32_t G_BORDER_PIXEL                   = 2;
const uint32_t G_SNAP_PIXEL                     = 32;
const int32_t G_SHOW_BAR                        = 1;
const int32_t G_TOP_BAR                         = 1;
const char G_USER_FONT[]                        = "JetBrainsMono Nerd Font Mono:size=16";
const char G_DMENU_FONT[]                       = "JetBrainsMono Nerd Font Mono:size=17";
const char G_COLORSCHEME_BACKGROUND[]           = "#131313";
const char G_COLORSCHEME_BORDER[]               = "#393939";
const char G_COLORSCHEME_FOREGROUND[]           = "#dde1e6";
const char G_COLORSCHEME_SECONDARY[]            = "#262626";
const char G_COLORSCHEME_PRIMARY[]              = "#78a9ff";
const float G_MASTER_FACTOR                     = 0.55;
const int32_t G_MASTER_COUNT                    = 1;
const int32_t G_RESIZE_HINTS                    = 1;
const int32_t G_LOCK_FULLSCREEN                 = 1;
char G_DMENU_MONITOR[]                          = "0";
const char *G_DMENU_COMMAND[]                   = {"dmenu_run", "-m", G_DMENU_MONITOR, "-fn", G_DMENU_FONT, "-nb", G_COLORSCHEME_BACKGROUND, "-nf", G_COLORSCHEME_FOREGROUND, "-sb", G_COLORSCHEME_PRIMARY, "-sf", G_COLORSCHEME_SECONDARY, NULL};
const char *G_TERMINAL_COMMAND[]                = {"konsole", NULL};
const char *G_TAGS[]                            = { "", "", "", "", "", "", "", "", "" };

Development

Slacker uses a Makefile only approach for its build system, no overly complicated CMake, or Meson will be found here. Install the development tools using the following make commands.

# Install all X11 libraries and development tools for apt-get, or pacman based systems.
sudo make init-dev

# Run the window manager in an embedded X window for testing and development
make swm-debug

The following utilities are what a Unix C programmer using Makefiles targeting the X11 environment will need for debugging and testing, and sanity. They are all installed with the above init-dev command.

  1. bear => Generates a compile_commands.json file so your language service provider (clangd) will know what the hell is going on.

    • Usage: bear -- make all

  2. Xephyr => Allows the programmer to run the Window Manager in a nested X session so you don't have to log out , and back into the actual window manager. Perfect for developing, debugging and testing.

    • Usage: make swm-debug

  3. clang-format => Formats all source code files according the the root .clang-format file. This project uses the Linux kernel clang-format.

    • Usage make format

  4. clangd => Modern C/C++ code analyzing to editors.

    • Usage: Vim, Emacs, Vscode and Jetbrains all support it and handle it for you.

Debugging

This repository includes a Vscode launch.json file for attaching a debugger to swm while it's running inside an embedded Xephyr window. You will need to llvm debugging extension installed. You will also need to run the following commands.

This allows the necessary permissions needed for the debugger to attach.

echo 0 | sudo tee /proc/sys/kernel/yama/ptrace_scope

This is the compile command, there is a 15 second pause to give time to attach the debugger to the process, while compiled in debug mode, all debugging messages from swm will be printed to stdout.

make swm-debug

Maintainers

@thebashpotato

Contributing

PRs accepted.

Small note: If editing the README, please conform to the standard-readme specification.

License

MIT © 2023 Matt Williams