4 ms·

I've used dwm as my window manager for a couple years now, after switching from i3, and have never looked back (i3 was fine, but it had a bug that was affecting

I've used dwm as my window manager for a couple years now, after switching from i3, and have never looked back (i3 was fine, but it had a bug that was affecting me too often--I don't even remember what now). For me, the killer feature (aside from tiling vs overlapping) is that on my three monitors, I can switch virtual desktops independently on each monitor. After being able to do this, I don't understand why every window manager doesn't offer this. It's not uncommon with tiling WMs that have good multi-monitor support, but you really can't find it in traditional WMs. There's an unmaintained patch of openbox--openbox-multihead--that added the feature, and there's an "experimental" hybrid window manager written in Go (by the same author of the openbox patch), but no mainstream window managers appear to have the feature. Apparently it goes against a requirement/assumption in the EWMH spec and breaks existing pagers. But that's okay, because I don't use a pager. Anyway, it really is critical to how I work now. I can keep a set of windows on my right monitor, and flip between virtual desktops on my center monitor without the right monitor changing at all. (And no, using the "sticky" feature of other WMs doesn't work for me because sometimes I do want to flip to a different virtual desktop on the right monitor and have that set of windows for whatever context I'm switching to). Along the same lines, the pertag patch is part of making dwm the perfect windows manager for me. (If you're interested in the particular set of patches I use and my config, I maintain it at https://github.com/racingmars/dwm https://github.com/racingmars/dwm)

sbysb 5y ago
This is something I have come to realize I unconsciously have gotten very dependent on - MacOS let's you swap virtual desktops for the monitor you are currently focused on without swapping any of the others. I never realized how intuitive this is until switching back to my XFCE linux installation and getting very frustrated with virtual desktops entirely. I might have to give dwm a try again on my linux machine if it supports this.
- racingmars 5y ago
  Yes! Before I went all-in on desktop Linux, I was a Mac user, and MacOS definitely got virtual desktops exactly right in this regard.
  - justinsaccount 5y ago
    They definitely did not. OS X has the same issue as a lot of other VMs. You can not simply have a single pool of workspaces and chose to view any N of them, where N is the number of monitors that you have. In OS X you can have workspaces on your left monitor, and workspaces on your right monitor, but you can't easily share the workspaces between the monitors without re-arranging them. The only WM I have used that gets virtual desktops right for multi monitors is xmonad. Maybe dwm can work the same way, not sure. In xmonad you can have 10 workspaces and 2 monitors, and pull up any workspace on any monitor. You can have hotkeys to cycle workspaces on either monitor independently and a key to swap the two monitors.
    - niij 5y ago
      You can drag a workspace from one monitor to another in native Mac OS. With yabai you can hotkey it to send to a different one.
      - hiptobecubic 5y ago
        Not the same at all, really.
- hiptobecubic 5y ago
  My first real job back in 2013 gave all of the devs macbooks to work on. I never used it specifically because osx couldn't do this. Even now, they still don't get it right and treat each monitor as its own set of desktops.
  - runjake 5y ago
    Go into System Preferences, Mission Control, and uncheck “Displays have separate spaces”.
    - hiptobecubic 5y ago
      Oh if they fixed it that's great! I've got no reason to use it now, but maybe if I had another job like that one it would have been less frustrating.
      - runjake 5y ago
        FWIW: Not trolling, but I believe they added this setting in 2013 with Mavericks. Now, if macOS could get auto-tiling options like Linux has...
        awsation 5y ago
        Rectangle ? https://rectangleapp.com/ https://rectangleapp.com/
        runjake 5y ago
        I use Rectangle currently but it doesn’t auto-tile. Not that I can find anyway.
        wyclif 5y ago
        Apple should really make a native tiling feature. I just don't understand why they can't seem to do that yet.
HellsMaddy 5y ago
What’s a pager in the context of a window manager? I’m aware of CLI pagers like less but I’ve never heard the term used with WMs.
- racingmars 5y ago
  It's the little desktop "preview boxes," I guess you'd call them, that you can click on to switch between virtual desktops. Usually running in the taskbar in most desktop environments.
linkdd 5y ago
> It's not uncommon with tiling WMs that have good multi-monitor support, but you really can't find it in traditional WMs That's because this feature is not a Freedesktop standard. The X11 root window have a property _NET_NUMBER_OF_DESKTOPS and a few more[0] to help implement this behavior. Most tiling WMs choose to ignore this standard in favor of this great feature. But the WMs of Gnome, Xfce, KDE, etc... will probably never implement it just in case some apps don't support it (like some games that needs to be floating windows in tiling WMs). [0] - https://specifications.freedesktop.org/wm-spec/1.3/ar01s03.html
- badsectoracula 5y ago
  Freedesktop isn't specifying standards, it just puts out some specs to help interoperability where that is desired but not all specs are expected to be followed and really anyone can propose new specs. It is even in their site: https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/ https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/ > freedesktop.org produces specifications for interoperability, but we are not an official standards body. There is no requirement for projects to implement all of these specifications, nor certification. Freedesktop doesn't have any sort of authority, while it does provide some useful specs (e.g. the .desktop files are in general useful), not everything they do is like that. The reason that this isn't found in floating WMs is simply that the developers of those WMs didn't found it useful to implement it, not because of Freedesktop (which BTW could update EWMH to include such a thing, it isn't like it has to be written in stone).
ghostpepper 5y ago
I use both i3 (actually Sway) and MacOS on a daily basis and they both support this feature. I agree I could not live without it. I have never used dwm seriously, but as far as I can tell the main feature it offers over i3 is tagging. I don't really understand how this meaningfully changes the day to day workflow, and I'd love to hear what you consider to be the advantages.
- sidpatil 5y ago
  > I have never used dwm seriously, but as far as I can tell the main feature it offers over i3 is tagging. What are you specifically referring to when you say "tagging"?
  - ghostpepper 5y ago
    I think it was explained to me as the ability to tag certain windows with short descriptors and then assign tags or groups of tags to different displays/layouts/panes. The main reason I haven't tried it because I had already switched to Sway and gotten rid of Xorg entirely.
    - LanternLight83 5y ago
      I think the great part is being able to assign multiple tags to a window so it appears under multiple workspaces (same toolbelt as a sticky tag, which can co-exist), and being able to assign multiple tags to a workspace ("Chat" and "Music"). The ability to toggle your music windows in and out of existence, independently of other contexts, feels more like having every window on a hotkey than switching to another entire workspace or using sticky. It abstracts your contexts out from your workspaces and allows you to preform manipulations across those sets. I don't think dwm would let you show the difference (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Difference_set https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Difference_set) between two tags without a patch (because why?), but if you wanted to you could.
- saladuh 5y ago
  No, the biggest feature of DWM is dynamic window tiling (pretty sure DWM stands for Dynamic Window Manager). Sway/i3 can be made to kinda dynamically tile with scripts, but it's much less consistent, less powerful, and hardly works. They are manual tilers and they don't try to be dynamic tilers. Personally I prefer being able to quickly toggle a dynamic window layout based on my current workflow, and switch back to manual tiling when I specifically need to manually tile. Currently I use Sway too as it's the most mature tiling compositor on Wayland, but once River WM[0], also based on wlroots, matures more I think I will likely make the switch because I often miss dynamic tiling. [0] https://github.com/riverwm/river https://github.com/riverwm/river On a side note, I hate how window moving works in Sway/i3. I can hardly ever get windows to move to where I want them to go with keyboard. As a result, I have a bind that enters a 'move' mode that takes the current selected window and moves it to a window that I can select. That, or I just use the mouse to drag the window, which is kinda annoying considering this is a keeb focussed environment.
justinsaccount 5y ago
> I can keep a set of windows on my right monitor, and flip between virtual desktops on my center monitor without the right monitor changing at all. If you decide that you want to see two workspaces from your center monitor, can you easily pull up one of them on the right monitor? The only thing I've ever used that lets you do this is xmonad (described in another comment below).
- generalizations 5y ago
  Yup. There's a spot in the default config file to specify a key binding to move the whole virtual desktop to another window.

sbysb 5y ago

This is something I have come to realize I unconsciously have gotten very dependent on - MacOS let's you swap virtual desktops for the monitor you are currently focused on without swapping any of the others. I never realized how intuitive this is until switching back to my XFCE linux installation and getting very frustrated with virtual desktops entirely. I might have to give dwm a try again on my linux machine if it supports this.

racingmars 5y ago
Yes! Before I went all-in on desktop Linux, I was a Mac user, and MacOS definitely got virtual desktops exactly right in this regard.
- justinsaccount 5y ago
  They definitely did not. OS X has the same issue as a lot of other VMs. You can not simply have a single pool of workspaces and chose to view any N of them, where N is the number of monitors that you have. In OS X you can have workspaces on your left monitor, and workspaces on your right monitor, but you can't easily share the workspaces between the monitors without re-arranging them. The only WM I have used that gets virtual desktops right for multi monitors is xmonad. Maybe dwm can work the same way, not sure. In xmonad you can have 10 workspaces and 2 monitors, and pull up any workspace on any monitor. You can have hotkeys to cycle workspaces on either monitor independently and a key to swap the two monitors.
  - niij 5y ago
    You can drag a workspace from one monitor to another in native Mac OS. With yabai you can hotkey it to send to a different one.
    - hiptobecubic 5y ago
      Not the same at all, really.
hiptobecubic 5y ago
My first real job back in 2013 gave all of the devs macbooks to work on. I never used it specifically because osx couldn't do this. Even now, they still don't get it right and treat each monitor as its own set of desktops.
- runjake 5y ago
  Go into System Preferences, Mission Control, and uncheck “Displays have separate spaces”.
  - hiptobecubic 5y ago
    Oh if they fixed it that's great! I've got no reason to use it now, but maybe if I had another job like that one it would have been less frustrating.
    - runjake 5y ago
      FWIW: Not trolling, but I believe they added this setting in 2013 with Mavericks. Now, if macOS could get auto-tiling options like Linux has...
      - awsation 5y ago
        Rectangle ? https://rectangleapp.com/ https://rectangleapp.com/
        runjake 5y ago
        I use Rectangle currently but it doesn’t auto-tile. Not that I can find anyway.
        wyclif 5y ago
        Apple should really make a native tiling feature. I just don't understand why they can't seem to do that yet.

HellsMaddy 5y ago

What’s a pager in the context of a window manager? I’m aware of CLI pagers like less but I’ve never heard the term used with WMs.

racingmars 5y ago
It's the little desktop "preview boxes," I guess you'd call them, that you can click on to switch between virtual desktops. Usually running in the taskbar in most desktop environments.

linkdd 5y ago

> It's not uncommon with tiling WMs that have good multi-monitor support, but you really can't find it in traditional WMs That's because this feature is not a Freedesktop standard. The X11 root window have a property _NET_NUMBER_OF_DESKTOPS and a few more[0] to help implement this behavior. Most tiling WMs choose to ignore this standard in favor of this great feature. But the WMs of Gnome, Xfce, KDE, etc... will probably never implement it just in case some apps don't support it (like some games that needs to be floating windows in tiling WMs). [0] - https://specifications.freedesktop.org/wm-spec/1.3/ar01s03.html

badsectoracula 5y ago
Freedesktop isn't specifying standards, it just puts out some specs to help interoperability where that is desired but not all specs are expected to be followed and really anyone can propose new specs. It is even in their site: https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/ https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/ > freedesktop.org produces specifications for interoperability, but we are not an official standards body. There is no requirement for projects to implement all of these specifications, nor certification. Freedesktop doesn't have any sort of authority, while it does provide some useful specs (e.g. the .desktop files are in general useful), not everything they do is like that. The reason that this isn't found in floating WMs is simply that the developers of those WMs didn't found it useful to implement it, not because of Freedesktop (which BTW could update EWMH to include such a thing, it isn't like it has to be written in stone).

ghostpepper 5y ago

I use both i3 (actually Sway) and MacOS on a daily basis and they both support this feature. I agree I could not live without it. I have never used dwm seriously, but as far as I can tell the main feature it offers over i3 is tagging. I don't really understand how this meaningfully changes the day to day workflow, and I'd love to hear what you consider to be the advantages.

sidpatil 5y ago
> I have never used dwm seriously, but as far as I can tell the main feature it offers over i3 is tagging. What are you specifically referring to when you say "tagging"?
- ghostpepper 5y ago
  I think it was explained to me as the ability to tag certain windows with short descriptors and then assign tags or groups of tags to different displays/layouts/panes. The main reason I haven't tried it because I had already switched to Sway and gotten rid of Xorg entirely.
  - LanternLight83 5y ago
    I think the great part is being able to assign multiple tags to a window so it appears under multiple workspaces (same toolbelt as a sticky tag, which can co-exist), and being able to assign multiple tags to a workspace ("Chat" and "Music"). The ability to toggle your music windows in and out of existence, independently of other contexts, feels more like having every window on a hotkey than switching to another entire workspace or using sticky. It abstracts your contexts out from your workspaces and allows you to preform manipulations across those sets. I don't think dwm would let you show the difference (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Difference_set https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Difference_set) between two tags without a patch (because why?), but if you wanted to you could.
saladuh 5y ago
No, the biggest feature of DWM is dynamic window tiling (pretty sure DWM stands for Dynamic Window Manager). Sway/i3 can be made to kinda dynamically tile with scripts, but it's much less consistent, less powerful, and hardly works. They are manual tilers and they don't try to be dynamic tilers. Personally I prefer being able to quickly toggle a dynamic window layout based on my current workflow, and switch back to manual tiling when I specifically need to manually tile. Currently I use Sway too as it's the most mature tiling compositor on Wayland, but once River WM[0], also based on wlroots, matures more I think I will likely make the switch because I often miss dynamic tiling. [0] https://github.com/riverwm/river https://github.com/riverwm/river On a side note, I hate how window moving works in Sway/i3. I can hardly ever get windows to move to where I want them to go with keyboard. As a result, I have a bind that enters a 'move' mode that takes the current selected window and moves it to a window that I can select. That, or I just use the mouse to drag the window, which is kinda annoying considering this is a keeb focussed environment.

justinsaccount 5y ago

> I can keep a set of windows on my right monitor, and flip between virtual desktops on my center monitor without the right monitor changing at all. If you decide that you want to see two workspaces from your center monitor, can you easily pull up one of them on the right monitor? The only thing I've ever used that lets you do this is xmonad (described in another comment below).

generalizations 5y ago
Yup. There's a spot in the default config file to specify a key binding to move the whole virtual desktop to another window.