this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2024
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As always there's no such thing as a global "best" application. Building your system is a very personal thing. It all depends on your needs and liking.
My personal journey in the tiling WM world has started 20 years ago with awesomewm. Then I moved to i3 because it feels lighter to me while offering a configuration approach I preferred. After some times, I felt ready to "really" build my tiling WM and I moved to dwm.
I couldn't be happier until I came across bspwm which is as suckless as dwm but EWMH compliant. I also love the nice approach of keybindings offered by sxhkd. What I appreciate the most is the no limit configuration power since you can integrate the very powerful program that writes messages on bspwm 's socket (bspc) in any scripts you can imagine. This let you create some crazy and very personal rules. For example, I designed one where bspwm is listening to my video player state and if not fullscreen it automatically resizes it to a given size and moves it to a specific position. I have another one that will apply borders only to 2 specific windows applications and use a different color for each one.
This is a very brief overview of what I've experimented. Your expectations and the time you want to deserve to your configuration may guide you on another path. Archwiki has a comparison of tiling WM may be a good starting point to help you in your decision.
Interesting. As a dwm guy I was unaware of ewmh standards. Have you used dwm to be able to compare? I love dwm, but it does behave in some cagey ways at times.
I used dwm for few years before moving to bspwm.
Best parts of switching?
You know how hard it is to explain personal preferences when we talk about tiling WM but, as I mentioned in my first post, I would say that bspwm offer some further granularity. I didn't thought that was possible after using dwm but to come back to my example I have bspwm listening to the state of my media player. Everytime it becomes floating, bspwm resize the window, place it on a specific position, and add a border to it. This is just one example. Also, even though you can use it with any tiling WM, sxhkd has been developed with bspwm in mind and offers the best keybindings management I've ever tested. Thanks to chords, several commands can be associated to independent keybindings within the same piece of code like so:
Control and a number will switch you to a workspace. If you also press Shift the active window will be sent to a given workspace.
I'm already using sxhkd with dwm but it's probably underdeveloped. I want something like that above but with an additional hotkey to change send the active window to a workspace and then switch to that workspace but I haven't worked it up. I debated using a QMK tapdance feature for that but have never switched to my QMK keyboard.
I guess to get at my real question, dwm (or maybe more accurately some of the applications I run) generate windows in weird ways. Zoom for instance doesn't generate notifications for things like unstable wifi, but rather tiles a new window for 2 seconds which is REALLY annoying. Also the window swallowing feature is pretty finicky for things like (n)vim+latex in continuous compiling situations.
It's all fixable... But it's just a massive headache since (on my work pc) changing a dwm config means logging out and back in to see the results.
I would need to go back to my old dwm config file but I think what you're looking for is this patch. In bspwm this is achieved with the "follow" option as shown in my example.
To restart dwm without login out and back in you'll need this in your .xinitrc:
Then whenever you kill dwm with
kill -HUP $(pidof -s dwm)it will actually be reloaded. Seems like there's also 2 patches to do that now (note that they both mention the above method as well).https://dwm.suckless.org/patches/restartsig/
https://dwm.suckless.org/patches/selfrestart/
@dream_weasel Did that help?