DWM - not your average mainstream window manager



Have been playing around with a new window manager (new as in for me, I've only used fluxbox, kde and gnome before) called DWM - see more information on www.suckless.org.

I'm running it on a T400 with RHEL6 (which uses gnome login manager - gde).

Basically

  1. if you want to make a change like modify keyboard shortcuts, rules, tagging, top bar stuff, you need to edit config.h and then compile (make and then make install). Then you need to re-load dwm.
  2. after that is done, create a properly formatted file under /usr/share/xsession/
  3. then in the login manager you can chose dwm :)

Notes

  1. install dmenu as well, it is neat. ALT+P, then type what you want to run, then hit enter. Also if you type in 'lock' it will find xlock etc.
  2. ALT+SHIFT+ENTER gives you the terminal, ALT+SHIFT+Q quits dwm and gets you back to the login manager.
  3. ALT is the default, can be modified to apple- or windows-key

My problems

  1. re-load dwm can be done in several ways but I have not found one that works well for me. If you do like me and run dwm in a while loop the only way I've found out so far is to reboot the whole machine. Because I don't know how to log off the session and get back to the gdm login manager. I hope I do find a way around because rebooting kind of sucks ;)
  2. gnome-session-save --logout does not work -gave some kind of error
  3. MODKEY+SHIFT+Q only seems to re-fresh the screen, doesn't actually re-load the whole she-bang.

DWM top bar can be edited to show other things than DWM version. See my post here about that.