[2024-feb-29] Sad news: Eric Layton aka Nocturnal Slacker aka vtel57 passed away on Feb 26th, shortly after hospitalization. He was one of our Wiki's most prominent admins. He will be missed.

Welcome to the Slackware Documentation Project

This is an old revision of the document!


dwm - dynamic window manager

dwm is a dynamic window manager for X11 that supports organization of windows in tiled, floating, and monocle layouts. Windows are grouped together on tags where they can be reorganized and modified.

dwm Installation

You can install dwm from SlackBuilds. Alternatively you may clone the source with git clone https://git.suckless.org/dwm and build via the instructions in the README text file.

dwm Dependencies

  • X11
  • FreeType

The newest version of dwm, 6.5, does not build on Slackware 14.2 at the time of writing this article. You will have to try an older version.

Starting dwm

The SlackBuilds dwm will create a xinit script for you. If you build dwm yourself you will need to create a file named xinitrc.dwm in the /etc/X11/xinit directory. A typically xinitrc for dwm might look as such:

# /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.dwm
# set wallpaper or resolution

# dunst & # start notification daemon
# dwmblocks & # start statusbar program
# xcompmgr -CFn & # start compositor

exec dwm # start dwm

With that in place run xwmconfig in your terminal to switch to your configuration file.

dwm Configuration

dwm configuration is done through the source instead of a runtime configuration file. The config.h file contains all of the configuration options.

dwm Usage

Common Key Shortcuts

Alt+Shift+Enter launch st(suckless terminal)
Alt+J/k cycle focus to different windows on the current tag
Alt+H/l shrink or grow the master window
Alt+1/9 change to window tags 1 through 9
Alt+Shift+C close the currently focused window
Alt+Shift+Q quit dwm cleanly

Program Menu

If you also installed dmenu you can press Alt+P and type the program name or use the arrow keys then press enter. This will execute the selected program. ⇐

Resources

Sources

 howtos:window_managers:dwm_-_dynamic_window_manager ()