/cowm

A tiling window manager for farmers and peasants

Primary LanguageCMIT LicenseMIT

Cowm is a dynamic tiling window manager for X and a fork of dwm, is designed to be easy to use, EWMH compliant and themable like LeftWM.

The changes from dwm have been made around the idea of easy and quick personalization. The goal is to create a version of dwm entirely customizable via X resources and that can be easily used with tools like polybar. There are plenty of window managers out there that meet these requirements, but we really like dwm and wanted to work from there.

The dwm patches cannot be directly applied, but are quite easy to implement by hand.

Getting started

The installation process is identical to dwm's. Clone the repo, navigate to the directory and install using make.

git clone https://github.com/lfoscari/cowm
cd cowm
sudo make install

After compilig for the first time a config.h file is createid, this is the applied configuration file. If anything breaks, just delete config.h and recompile.

Theming

Thanks to the magic of X resources in cowm is possible to change some values while running, more options are coming soon. The values currently updatable via ~/.Xresources are:

! COWM
cowm.norm_fg: #FFFFFF
cowm.norm_bg: #000000
cowm.norm_border: #000000

cowm.sel_fg: #000000
cowm.sel_bg: #FFFFFF
cowm.sel_border: #000000

Default keys

  • Mod + (1-9) switch to a tag
  • Mod + Shift + (1-9) move the focused window to tag
  • Mod + (↑↓) focus the different windows in the current workspace
  • Mod + Shift + (↑↓) change stack window size
  • Mod + Shift + (←→) change master horizontal size
  • Mod + Enter open a terminal
  • Mod + q close the current window
  • Mod + Shift + r reload the Xresources
  • Mod + Shift + q exit cowm

To implement

  • Switch tags with arrows
  • Pick Xresources (with soft-reload)
  • Up & down bash script
  • Included bar (like spectrwm)

To fix

  • Transparency brigthens the color
  • Xresources overwrite the current values, there is no default value option after making at least one change
  • Mod + Shift + Enter doesn't move window to/from stack

dwm patches

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