rwm

rust window manager ported from dwm

For now this is a line-for-line port of dwm 6.4 with tons of unsafe code. Now that it's working in this state, I'll start moving toward a safe Rust version where possible. Linked lists are pretty cool, though.

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 been building with a Rust 1.81.0 nightly compiler from 2024-06-11 and test in CI with nightly, but I don't use any nightly features, so it will likely build with a stable toolchain too.

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