First of all, sorry for the long break, just did not find the time or motivation to write something, tho I have collected a few ideas about what to write.

The irony, the first post after the break is none of those ideas ^^

I want to write about my Window Manager today. For those who do not know what a Window Manager (WM) is, it is basically the program, which arranges the windows on your screen.

My WM at the moment and for the foreseeable future is dwm, which stands for dynamic window manager. It is part of the suckless software suite, which I quite enjoy because if it’s simplicity and do it yourself approach, tho I can see, that this is not for everybody, especially because you have to patch the source code to get to a state where it is a comfortable experience.

Software I use from the suckless guys includes dwm, st, dmenu and the more or less official dwmblocks. My dwm, dwmblocks and st builds I have patched my self, for dmenu I use the version from Distrotube with a few color changes to match my theme.

So let’s get to the matter at hand. I have used dwm for a longer time and I really like how it flows and how I configured it. The only thing that bugged me a bit recently was, that I could only use the built in statusbar, together with something like dwmblocks to make it a bit easier to manage. But one time I scrolled through the patches on the suckless website and found the anybar patch, which caught my attention. I wanted to also have support for polybar, which also required the IPC patch, which is quite extensive. I also wanted to redo my dwm config for some time now, so I decided, that I will go for it. I sit down one evening and start the process. I take a look at my current config, which patches I have applied and which of those I want to keep and make my selection. The journey of that first attempt you can see on my mastdon page. To summarize it, I applied all the patches and it broke.

It first would not start at all, I fiddled around with the dwm code and my polybar config and somehow got it to a point where it would launch, but crash if I opened a program. At this point it was already really late, so I went to bed. In the morning I planned to do some school work, but instead of doing that I got distracted by this issue. So it started from the beginning once again, but instead of applying the anybar patch at the beginning I applied it as the second last, before the IPC patch, and kept the other statusbar patches, like to colorbar patch, for the end, and it somehow worked. I don’t know why or how, but it does and now I am happy.

I wanted to go for a minimal theme, so I configured my polybar to be completely transparent, witch black letters, only displaying workspaces, music info, weather, volume, time and date and my posture check counter.

Here are some expressions from my rice:

If you like what you see and want to use my config or just my patched dwm, because you are to lazy to patch it yourself, which I could totally understand, you can find everything on my GitHub. If anything is missing or you have questions, massage me on mastodon or write me a mail.