My Own Window Manager

I accidentaly wrote a window manager. It started out by cloning cloudef’s monsterwm-xcb to apply some smaller fixes, maybe opening a pull request to merge them upstream again. But I quickly found more and more things to fix, then I started to add some smaller features I missed from other window managers. And thus, FrankenWM was made, pieced together from monsterwm-xcb and other window managers. I stole some of the ewmh-related code from 2bwm, and adapted features from dwm, i3 and others. The name is an obvious play on words.

So, what does it do? From a user’s standpoint it is quite similar to dwm or awesome (or of course monsterwm). It tiles dynamically, using one big master window and a stack of smaller slave windows on each virtual desktop. There are a few predefined layouts to choose from, v-stack, b-stack, grid, fibnonacci and monocle. V-stack stacks the slave windows next to the master window, b-stack below the master. Grid tries to give the same amount of screen space to every window by placing them in a grid-like structure, fibonacci makes the each window 50% as big as the window above it in the stack. And finally, monocle fullscreens every window in a stacking fashion so you just see one at a time.

The preferred way of controlling it is by using the keyboard, which uses a set of shortcuts similar to the ones known from vim by default, and makes heavy use of the Mod4-/Meta-/Windows-key to prevent overlapping with shortcuts for other software. The mouse can be used to control floating windows and to select windows, but the focus lies on mouse-less usage.

There is also support for adding gaps between the windows, inspired by dwm’s useless gaps patch, which allow you to see your wallpaper or dropshadows from a compositor. Those gaps are adjustable on the fly and optionally specific to virtual desktops. I also implemented some features to allow using floating windows without having to use the mouse. On the more technical side of things I am currently implementing EWMH-compliance, which is important for compability with a lot of different programs.

The configuration is entirely done at compile time by editing the config.h. In my git repository I include a sample config with some comments explaining how to use it. As an alternate example, you can have a look at my personal config, which uses some more advanced features. As a bonus for Arch users, I also maintain an AUR package which I update on bigger changes in the git repository, although I still reccomend using the version from Github, as I do not have a lot of experience with the AUR.

The prerequisites for building FrankenWM are all XCB-based, specifically you will need the XCB headers including the util, util-wm and keysyms ones, which you can probably pull out of your distribution’s repositories. I have yet to build it on my OpenBSD machine, so I cannot say anything yet to building it on the BSD family.