gabelstaplerwm

NOTE: gabelstaplerwm is currently being rewritten (because I can't get my priorities straight and do such things). During that time, the next branch will hold the rewrite, the stable and working codebase will still receive bugfixes in case something catastrophic happens, and will be available in the master branch in the meantime.

gabelstaplerwm is a semidynamic tiling window manager written in the Rust programming language and using the XCB wrappers available. It's main design goals are simplicity, correctness in behaviour and configurability, coupled with compile-time configuration by the user, minimizing overhead at runtime and allowing for sophisticated dynamic behaviour. This is achieved by minimizing the responsibilities of the window manager.

Concepts

gabelstaplerwm is inspired by dwm and awesomewm, adding a few ideas of it's own to the concept of a dynamic window manager. It shares the tag idiom with it's ancestors-in-spirit, but implements a slightly different approach at managing them. The author believes this is the most flexible solution achieved using such a system, while still efficient to implement and use.

What are tags at all?

Users of awesome/dwm are familiar with the tag concept. Where classical approaches to window management introduce a structure called a workspace, tags are a more flexible alternative. Essentially, each window is associated with a set of tags, and a user can display an arbitrary set of tags, which would render all windows tagged with at least one of those tags on the screen.

Naturally, this concept is tightly coupled with layouts: if the sets of windows displayed on screen are computed dynamically, then manually arranging them in a grid would be painful and suboptimal. Thus, the geometries of the windows shown are computed dynamically by so-called layouts, which are simple arrangement patterns that can be applied to arbitrary numbers of windows.

These concepts are battle-tested and implemented in a few so-called dynamic window managers, of which awesome and dwm are the most prominent. However, even if arbitrary sets of tags can be shown at any time, tags remain a very flexible implementation of workspaces. This is because tag sets with more than one element are hard to display in a quick fashion and remain second-class citizens. gabelstaplerwm reduces tags to symbolic values and allows for powerful mechanisms to add, remove, and edit tag sets at runtime, making working with the concept more efficient.

How do you use them?

At the time of writing, some changes are still being worked on, that might affect the recommended way of configuring the tag system. For now, see the code, and especially the config branch for the author's configuration.

Why doesn't it have feature X?

Frankly, the goal is to keep the window manager small and clean, yet functional, while avoiding feature creep. This means that no window decoration, no graphical effects, included status bars or wallpaper setting functionality is included.

Those things are certainly useful, but can be provided from a different piece of software in a better way.

How does it look?

Tough question. As mentioned above, the visuals are pretty boring. Here is a screenshot of my configuration:

The status bar is provided using lemonbar and bartender. Some of the inputs (particularly the currently shown tagset and window manager mode are provided by gabelstaplerwm itself. The visible menu is just a dmenu instance.

Configuration and Installation

Simple as the source itself:

1. Read the src/wm/config.rs file.
2. Read the other sources, as you see fit. I can also recommend the config branch for this purpose. Note that it interacts with other components I have set up.
3. Edit the configuration to your liking.
4. Compile and install with cargo.
5. Repeat as necessary.

Documentation

Currently, the only docs available are the (partly pretty extensive) comments in the sources. If there are unclear aspects, feel free to file an issue on GitHub. There is also a help document planned, but considering the configuration model, understanding the source is pretty useful anyway.

Future Development

The project isn't stale, but I pause it from time to time when other things happen. At the moment, I'm very happy with the set of features and focus mainly on bugfixes and performance improvements.

There is also a long-term development underway that is supposed to bring i3-style window trees to gabelstaplerwm, ultimately yielding a combination of manual and dynamic layouts.

Contributing

Contribution is always welcome, be it bug reports, feedback, patches or proposals. GitHub should be an appropriate platform for this.