rwm

rust window manager ported from dwm

rwm was originally a line-for-line port of dwm 6.4 with tons of unsafe code. There's now a little bit less unsafe code, with some parts moved to safe Rust, but there are now some functional differences from dwm too:

• Lua-based config file
• Several dwm patches applied
  • systray for a system tray
  • swallow for window swallowing
  • pertag for per-tag layouts and other settings
  • scratchpad for a persistent but hidable scratch terminal
  • stacker (partial) for moving windows up and down the stack

Configuration

The default config file for rwm is $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/rwm/config.lua or $HOME/.config/rwm/config.lua if XDG_CONFIG_HOME is not set. As inspired by ghostty's "Zero configuration" approach, the default, empty config provides the normal dwm bindings out of the box. A warning will be emitted if no config file is found, but rwm will substitute the default value and run like normal.

The default config options are specified in src/config.lua, with the settings ultimately ready from the rwm table therein. To override settings in your own config file, just set the corresponding options on the rwm table. For example, to enable resize_hints and change your default font, add this code to your own config.lua file:

rwm.resize_hints = true
rwm.fonts = {"monospace:size=12"}

Everything in src/config.lua is in scope when your config is read, so you can use the key, button, and rule constructor functions, and the tagkeys function for generating the repetitive Mod+1, ..., Mod+9 bindings for manipulating tags.

Key bindings

The code below is from my personal config but arguably should be included in the repo. It handles overwriting existing keys when conflicts occur in your custom bindings. If you don't locate existing keys and overwrite them, rwm will run all bindings associated with the key, not just the newest one.

-- Look for key collisions and replace any conflicts instead of appending. If
-- you actually want multiple behaviors on the same key, just call
-- `table.insert` directly
function locate_key (o)
   for i, k in ipairs(rwm.keys) do
	  if k.keysym == o.keysym and k.mod_ == o.mod_ then
		 return i
	  end
   end
   return false
end

for _, key in ipairs(keys) do
   idx = locate_key(key)
   if idx then
	  rwm.keys[idx] = key
   else
	  table.insert(rwm.keys, key)
   end
end

Just combine this with a custom keys table like the one defined in src/config.lua. Of course, if you'd rather include a full key table, you can simply override rwm.keys directly.

Screenshot

As you can see, it looks just like dwm, with the addition of a simple bar from the blocks subdirectory! You can spawn windows with the default dwm keybindings. Try out Mod+Shift+Enter for st or Mod+p for dmenu_run!

Installation

The following command should work:

make install

This defers to cargo install and thus will place the resulting binary in ~/.cargo/bin by default.

I've most recently built rwm with a stable 1.82 compiler, but I also test in CI on nightly, so anything after 1.82 should work well. At least 1.82 is required because I use the new &raw syntax from that release.

You'll also need the X11, Xft, Xinerama, and fontconfig libraries installed on your system where rustc can find them, but the x11 and fontconfig-sys crates should help with detecting and linking against these.

Finally, if you're installing an experimental window manager based on dwm and written in Rust, it's probably safe to assume you know how to start a window manager. But just to be safe, I recommend putting something like the following in your $HOME/.xinitrc script and launching with startx:

while true
do
	rwm
done

Wrapping it with this loop allows smoother restarting, but you can also use the simpler exec rwm if you prefer.

You can optionally set the log level with the RUST_LOG environment variable. I think I only used log::trace!, so you'll need RUST_LOG=trace if you need to debug anything.

If you use a display manager, you can also include an rwm.desktop file wherever your distro keeps those (maybe /usr/share/xsessions/?) that looks like the one below. I've had success with this approach on an Ubuntu VM.

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Rwm
Comment=Rust window manager
Exec=rwm
Icon=rwm
Type=XSession