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A great aspect of bspwm is that it is relatively unopinionated about how it is configured and controlled. You can easily invoke bspc from any language of your c

A great aspect of bspwm is that it is relatively unopinionated about how it is configured and controlled. You can easily invoke bspc from any language of your choosing. No need to be limited by an inexpressive configuration file. No need to write the configuration in one specific language that the developer favoured. Another feature I appreciate is that it does not bind any keys. It is left up to the user to implement. I get to choose which keys are used, and what they do. I wish all programs I used allowed me to configure their key bindings like this. bspwm is less of a window manager in the traditional sense, and more of a tool that can be used to build your own window manager.

kevlar1818 6y ago
Absolutely this. I'll highlight two sub-commands of bspc that are particularly helpful for "building your own window manager" as you mention: You can dump the entire state of bspwm to JSON using `bspc wm -d`, and you can subscribe to window manager events using `bspc subscribe`. An example I've implemented for myself: When opening a single app in an empty workspace, by default bspwm stretches the window to fit the whole screen (as usual with tiling window managers). On big monitors, this can be pretty annoying (e.g. staring at the very upper left corner of your 32" monitor when using a terminal). Using bspc, I can listen to when new windows are added, inspect bspwm's state to see if the new window is in a workspace on its own, and then use bspc to adjust the margins on the workspace to make the window a more comfortable size in the center of the screen. Even in Python I can do this in ~100ms.
- boogies 6y ago
  That particular example sounds more complicated than it is to apply dwm’s alwayscentered patch, yank-put the Gimp isfloating example line in the default config.g, and s/Gimp/terminal/ (which doesn’t actually require truly grokking C).
  - p_l 6y ago
    Or XMonad's layout processing pipeline. But it's a nice trick and I will fully admit it :)

kevlar1818 6y ago

Absolutely this. I'll highlight two sub-commands of bspc that are particularly helpful for "building your own window manager" as you mention: You can dump the entire state of bspwm to JSON using `bspc wm -d`, and you can subscribe to window manager events using `bspc subscribe`. An example I've implemented for myself: When opening a single app in an empty workspace, by default bspwm stretches the window to fit the whole screen (as usual with tiling window managers). On big monitors, this can be pretty annoying (e.g. staring at the very upper left corner of your 32" monitor when using a terminal). Using bspc, I can listen to when new windows are added, inspect bspwm's state to see if the new window is in a workspace on its own, and then use bspc to adjust the margins on the workspace to make the window a more comfortable size in the center of the screen. Even in Python I can do this in ~100ms.

boogies 6y ago
That particular example sounds more complicated than it is to apply dwm’s alwayscentered patch, yank-put the Gimp isfloating example line in the default config.g, and s/Gimp/terminal/ (which doesn’t actually require truly grokking C).
- p_l 6y ago
  Or XMonad's layout processing pipeline. But it's a nice trick and I will fully admit it :)