NOTE: The master branch is considered stable and can be used instead of the latest release version by people who wish to do so.
Kwm started as a simple project to get true focus-follows-mouse support on OSX through event tapping. It is now a tiling window manager that represents windows as the leaves of a binary tree. Kwm supports binary space partitioned, monocle and floating spaces.
Kwm uses the event taps API (Quartz Event Services) to observe, filter and alter user input events prior to their delivery to a foreground application. This allows for functionality such as focus-follows-mouse, and different types of hotkeys.
Kwm runs a local daemon to read messages and trigger functions. Kwmc is used to write to Kwm's socket, and must be used when interacting with and configuring how Kwm works. For a list of available commands, view the Kwmc configuration reference.
For in depth information, view the Kwm reference page. For sample configurations and other useful scripts, check out the wiki. You can also drop by the channel ##kwm on freenode
Kwm requires access to the OSX accessibility API. Tested on El Capitan (10.11.1 - 10.11.6).
For more screenshots, click here.
The bar seen in the above screenshot can be found here.
NOTE: Kwm requires 'Displays have separate spaces' to be enabled.
A codesigned binary release is available through Homebrew
brew install koekeishiya/kwm/kwm
To compile from source
make install
Build with debug information
make
To make Kwm start automatically on login through launchd, if compiled from source
edit /path/to/kwm on line 9 of examples/com.koekeishiya.kwm.plist
cp examples/com.koekeishiya.kwm.plist ~/Library/LaunchAgents/
Manually start Kwm using launchctl (name of plist file will be different if installed through Homebrew).
launchctl load -w ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.koekeishiya.kwm.plist
I would recommend for Kwm to be managed by launchd, as it otherwise requires the terminal application to have Accessibility Permissions (Not Recommended).
The default configuration file is $HOME/.kwm/kwmrc and is a script that contains Kwmc commands
to be executed when Kwm starts. In addition to the above, the file $HOME/.kwm/init is a shell
script that will be ran after Kwm has finished setting up the internal configuration.
A different path can be used by running kwm -c /path/to/kwmrc or kwm --config /path/to/kwmrc,
in which case it would probably be a good idea to set the directories Kwm uses for various settings.
A sample config file can be found within the examples directory. Any error that occur during parsing of the config file will be written to stderr. Click here for more information.
First of all, Kwm will always be free and open source, however some users have expressed interest in some way to show their support.
If you wish to do so, I have set up a patreon here.