DWM - Dynamic Window Manager

DWM is an extremely fast, small, and dynamic window manager for X.

Requirements

For Debian or Debian based systems:

sudo apt install make gcc libx11-dev libxft-dev libxinerama-dev xorg

For Arch:

sudo pacman -S base-devel git libx11 libxft xorg-server xorg-xinit terminus-font

Installation

First we need to make sure that the $HOME/.local/bin folder is in the $PATH where the status bar script will be installed:

[ -d "$HOME/.local/bin" ] && /usr/bin/mkdir -p "$HOME/.local/bin" && PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH"

Edit config.mk to match your local setup (dwm is installed into the /usr/local namespace by default). Afterwards enter the following command to build and install dwm (if necessary as root):

sudo make clean install

Running dwm

Add the following line to your ~~/.xinitrc~ to start DWM using startx:

exec dwm

And then add the following line to run status bar script in .xinitrc file before exec dwm line:

exec "$HOME/.local/bin/bar" &

Configuration

The configuration of dwm is done by creating a custom config.def.h and (re)compiling the source code.

make clean && make

Development

You can test your modification without affecting your actual dwm configuration by setting up a virtual environment.

First you need to install Xephyr:

For Debian or Debian based systems: sudo apt install xserver-xephyr
For arch: sudo pacman -S xorg-server-xephyr

Create a window or virtual environment to display dwm:

Xephyr -br -ac -noreset -screen 1680x1050 :1 &

Then run dwm inside this environment: