This software is constantly changing and may break your workflow (yeah, it's that one xkcd comic, everyone knows it).
Windowchef is a stacking window manager that doesn't handle keyboard or
pointer inputs. A third party program (like sxhkd
) is needed in order to
translate keyboard and pointer events to waitron
commands.
Waitron is a program that sends commands to the window manager through X client messages. It doesn't print anything on success. The commands and the parameters are fed as program arguments and waitron delivers them to the windowchef.
Windowchef is written in C with the help of the XCB library for communicating with the X server. It supports randr and a subset of ewmh and icccm.
Window managers are spreading like rats these days (I may be wrong). So what do you want to achieve with this one?
What I want to achieve by writing windowchef is a simple window manager that provides basic functionality for a more minimal, yet comfortable workflow while being easily extensible using the standard UNIX way: shell scripts. Cool features like sorting windows by size on a specific monitor are not included in windowchef. Instead, the user is encouraged to write a script that does this using available tools like wmutils for window manipulation and disputils for getting information regarding randr outputs.
Have fun!
See the bundled .sxhkdrc
and .windowchefrc
for an example of a basic
configuration. Additionally, you can read the manual pages (windowchef(1)
and waitron(1)
).
The default configuration file is ~/.config/windowchef/windowchefrc
. It is usually
a shell script that calls waitron wm_config
for configuration. See the
manual page for waitron(1)
for details regarding this topic.
If you want to use window rules, a feature that windowchef lacks, you can use ruler.
xcb
xcb-randr
xcb-util-wm
xcb-keysyms
xproto
(compile-time dependency)Windowchef depends on xcb
to communicate with the X11 server, xcb-randr
to
gather information about connected displays and xcb-util-wm
for ewmh and icccm helper functions.
xcb-keysyms
and xproto
are required for mouse support.
I couldn't find compiled documentation for xcb-util-wm
so I compiled it and
put it on my website here.
Available in the AUR:
First, you may need to tweak the search path for some operating systems (e.g.
OpenBSD) in config.mk
.
Then, just make
it:
$ make
$ sudo make install
The Makefile
respects the DESTDIR
and PREFIX
variables.
Many of the features listed above are optional and can be disabled.
A window belongs in a maximum number of 1 groups. You can show or hide as many groups as you wish. For example, you can have group 1 with a terminal window for programming and another one with a shell opened and group 2 with a browser window. You can either show only group 1, only group 2 or both at the same time.
Windowchef allows you to add/remove windows to/from groups, show groups, hide groups or toggle them.
You can also activate sticky group mode. When activated, new windows are
automatically assigned to the currently selected group. Together with the group_activate_specific
command (see waitron(1)
), a workspace-like workflow can be achieved.
You can tell windowchef to move and resize a window so it can fit in a cell
of a virtual grid. The user specifies the size of the grid and the
coordinates of the cell the window will sit in. For example, I can define a 3x3
grid and put my window in the cell at x = 0
, y = 2
:
+-----------------------+
| | | |
|-------+--------+------|
| | | |
|-------+--------+------|
| xterm | | |
+-----------------------+
~~Windowchef doesn't offer any mouse moving/resizing features. You can emulate
that with xmmv(1)
and xmrs(1)
from wmutils' opt
.~~
It does now!
You can do 4 actions:
All actions (besides focusing windows) require pressing a modifier key
(super
or alt
, you choose) while doing it. You can configure all the mouse buttons for each action. The modifier key can be changed but it's the same for all actions.
You can also configure windowchef to require pressing the modifier key to focus windows.
When resizing, you don't need to put the pointer exactly in the corner/on the side of the window (like on windows or GNOME). It will work as long as it's in the right quarter of the window.
Windowchef doesn't come with a bar/panel on its own. Windowchef ignores
windows with the _NET_WM_WINDOW_TYPE_DOCK
type. Panels can get
information about the state of the window manager through ewmh properties.
Tested with lemonbar.
This software was written by tudurom.
Thanks to dcat and z3bra for writing wmutils. Their software helped me learn the essentials of X11 development.
Thanks to venam, Michaell Cardell and baskerville for the window managers they made: 2bwm, mcwm and bspwm (ironically they all end in wm :). Their programs were and still are a very good source of inspiration for anyone who wants to write a window manager.
And many, many thanks to contributors:
Thank you for using windowchef
!