Main development was shifted to a new window manager early 2017.
Kwm was a nice proof of concept, but had many faults in its architecture.
The experience gained while working on kwm has been huge, and so I found that starting a complete re-write from scratch was necessary to create a stable window manager of higher quality. Despite the time and effort this requires, it would be worth it in the end.
This repository and the currently available documentation will remain as is, but I highly suggest using the new chunkwm instead.
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.
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. Khd can be used to create keybindings to perform some Kwmc command. More info can be found in the example dir.
For in depth information, click here. 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.
A codesigned binary release is available through Homebrew
brew install koekeishiya/formulae/kwm
Manage Kwm using brew services
brew services start kwm
Copy the example config to ~/.kwm/kwmrc as described in the brew caveat section. If you'd like to use a different config file path: instead of using brew services, start Kwm using a custom launchd launch agent as described below in Starting *Kwm* on login through launchd.
NOTE: Kwm requires 'Displays have separate spaces' to be enabled.
Set directories used by Kwm for various settings.
Arguments:
-v | --version: Print version number to stdout
kwm -v
-c | --config: Specify location of config file
kwm -c ~/.kwmrc
NOTE: Documentation of available commands
The default configuration file is $HOME/.kwm/kwmrc and is a script that contains kwmc commands
to be executed when Kwm starts.
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.
Copy the vim syntax files to your vim config:
cp -r syntax/vim/* ~/.vim/
Or using pathogen:
cp -r syntax/vim ~/.vim/bundle/kwm
NOTE: Requires Xcode-8 command line tools
Build AXLib only
make install-lib # release version, runs cleanlib
make lib # debug version
Build Kwm (also builds AXLib if required)
make install # release version, runs cleankwm
make # debug version
Remove temporary build artifacts
make clean # runs cleanlib and cleankwm
make cleanlib # remove axlib artifacts
make cleankwm # remove kwm artifacts
Start Kwm on login using launchd as described below.
Provide your own custom launch agent
edit /path/to/kwm on line 9 of examples/com.koekeishiya.kwm.plist
cp examples/com.koekeishiya.kwm.plist ~/Library/LaunchAgents/
Manually manage Kwm using launchctl
launchctl load -w ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.koekeishiya.kwm.plist
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.