LeftWM - A Fast and Simple Xmonad Alternative

hello welcome back to the otb channel today i'm going to take a look at a new window manager written in rust called left wm it's incredibly simple to customize and i'm really impressed with it see you after the intro [Music] okay welcome back um i always forget this bit so perhaps now i'll tell you please like and subscribe it's great for the channel and please come and join me on library as well i'm starting to feel that library really is taking off and i think it's the future so if you want to watch this video ad free please go over there right let's get let's get on with the what today's video is about you know i like tiling window managers i've played with most of them um i found some of them pretty frustrating to configure xmo now probably being the prime example of that but i do like the way x monad works and it works in the same way as spector wm in terms of the way it treats its workspaces or tags or whatever they call them but i found q-tile so far to be the simplest to configure amongst those window managers that work in a very similar way they're all dynamic window managers so when distro tube kind of showcased left wm uh i think it was about three weeks ago i thought to myself well you've gotta have a look haven't you so that's exactly what i'm going to do today i'm going to show you what you get by default if you install left wm i'm going to show you how to switch between themes and then i'm just going to finish off by showing you what i've been living in for the last couple of weeks because i didn't want to do a review straight away until i'd actually you know used it in anger if you like and uh i'm pretty pleased with where i'm up to so let's go to the split screen and uh start the ball rolling right so uh you should see left wm's website on uh on the side of the screen now and uh it's pretty simple it doesn't say a huge amount why go left well it's written in rust for stability and performance i think rust is one of those new languages that's gaining a lot of traction at the moment and it's meant to be quite fast alacrity the terminal is written in rust and that's certainly fast and alacrity is actually the default terminal for this um and it says it's designed to do one thing and one thing well be a window manager and yeah a little bit like bspwm the structure of it is not one single config file it has a separate config file for the key bindings and then it works on this concept of themes that you have theme folders and the look and feel of left wm is all dictated by the themes and you can use a range of different bars you can use poly bar you can use lemon bar you can use x-mobar completely up to yourself but right from the word go if you launch leftwm all you're going to get is a black screen and the default key bindings which is pretty much what happens um so built around the concept of themes and there's not a huge amount on this page um it basically just introduces it you need to go to the github page really to uh get a little little bit more information what i have found i mean i had a look around the web to see what there is about leftwm you know what's been said and it there's surprisingly little out there it's it's still quite an early uh beta by the look of it i don't think it's been around a huge amount of time i could be wrong but certainly in the aur it's only up to something like 0.2 and it says it's a left left wm is a window manager for adventurers right okay i'm not quite sure why that is um it's not a compositor it's not a lock screen it's not a bar it's simply a window manager and you get a description on on the uh the github page of its default keys it manages workspaces uh or screens if you like in the same way as exmonad does and it's clearly geared up for using multi screens and and the concept of workspaces and screens are pretty much the same in leftwm but if you have one of these super wide screens they don't have to be you can have multiple workspaces on a single screen if that's what you want but by default one workspace per screen is what you get it has tags nine by default it's ewmh compliant which means that it will work with the likes of polybar and in terms of installing it well nice and simple if you use an archbase system it's in the aur you can also uh install it directly from crates io um is it cargo the uh rust package manager to be honest i don't know i don't use it but apparently you can install it in anything from there and it's also available in fedora's copr okay fine i just installed it from the aur um didn't have to do anything it set itself up automatically in light dm it was there as a login option at the end so i wasn't starting with startx and i didn't really need to do a great deal not that many dependencies and these are largely going to depend on what theme you use but fafer setting wallpaper a compositor d menu and then polybar x mobile or lemon bar and conkey so not a huge amount that you actually need what it does have here is if you look in on the gitlab page the files it has a number of themes that you can use to start off with and what i did is i just downloaded these from the gitlab page to have a play with them it's always easier if you start with something even with all the other window managers that um i use i've always started with somebody else's configuration and what left wm does is it gives you that start i believe there are also uh a number of uh community uh produced themes not hundreds but a few that you can download from there including a windows xp theme okay i haven't i haven't tried that um so i think that there isn't a lot to read about it it's one of those things you just have to try see what you think and and then it starts to kind of make sense what i've done for anybody who wants to kind of follow the same sort of experiment that that i've gone through i'm going to show you first of all the default setups then i'm going to show you what i've done and if anybody is interested in what i've done um i have uploaded my config to uh my um git lab page it's all there including well it's called basic poly bar but it's actually been customized it's my own theme so feel free to go there and you'll find all my my individual scripts in my bin file or actually in my polybar directory um so let's go let's look at what it looks like out of the box so you should uh actually see the screen of left wm in front of you and uh like most uh tiling window managers when you first start them up nothing to see here is probably all you can really say luckily it is running and i happen to know that if i do the super key the windows key shift and return i can open the terminal this is alacrity that i've just opened you will need alacrity uh as it has it has as its default terminal and i already have my ala alacrity customized with my own color scheme which i i've got matched into all the other window managers that i use it's actually the nord color scheme so how do we kind of go from here and how do we move around it well to start off with by default it has nine workspaces so i'm on workspace one if i hit super and two i go on to the second workspace where you can see i've got uh obs or i could go on to three where i've actually got genie opened and on to four where i've actually got pc man fm open in my config left wm directory now all i did to start off with uh after i'd installed leftwm was i created a leftwm directory in my config folder inside the leftwm directory i created another directory called themes and i downloaded the themes that are on the leftwm github page which are basic lemon bar basic poly bar and basic x mobile okay but as you can see i mean if i i go back to number one there's nothing to see here however you've got a good start with left wm what you need to do in order to apply one of the the standard themes is go into that directory config left wm themes you can see the themes there basic lemon bar basic poly bar basic x mobile and you need to create a symbolic link to whichever one of those themes that you want to use so let's start off by uh looking at basic poly bar so ln minus s basic poly bar and you need to call it current oops if i can type so if i now look there i've created a symbolic link called current you can see that there and it's linking to basic polybar now i can apply that theme simply by doing a soft restart which you do by super shift r and we'll see what happens and see what the basic polybar looks like and you can see something is changing here and let me you move to an unused workspace here and you can see it's applied a wallpaper uh using fey and the wallpaper was actually in the theme folder and we can click around here and we've got a few widgets up here already i'm not exactly sure what they are but clearly uh you've got volume there i've no idea what that 45 percent relates to or indeed that 13 or 34 percent or i presume one of those is cpu and one of them's memory and then we've got temperature being measured i don't think this pc is minus 262 degrees c it's pretty cold here but it's obviously picking up the wrong thing and it's got the time and date nevertheless you've got something to start you off and i quite like the look of that i have to say so that's your basic polybar theme and it gives you something to go at let's move back to workspace one if i now remove that symbolic link and we try the basic x mobile so exactly the same procedure um create the symbolic link to the basic x mobile uh folder call it current all good we can see it's now linked to that and i do super shift r again and see what comes up from here right and let's move over to uh another workspace so we get a better view of that we've got a different wallpaper again and uh yeah the x mobile is being used i can't say i'm a huge fan of this particular layout of xmo bar but it gives you a starting point and uh it's pretty basic this as you can see so it's got it's telling me what i'm running obs my cpu my memory how much swap i'm using my network time and date etc etc okay so i could stick with that or i've got the option to also use a lemon bar config so let's remove current again and link to basic lemon bar i've never actually used lemon bar i have to say but let's just check we've done that oh hard link not allowed for directory what if i oh i can see what i've done here if i got my s there we go so if we look there it's now linked to uh basic lemon bar so if i do super shift r and see what comes up from here i saw that the dependencies if you wanted to do this were obviously lemon bar and conkey was listed on the left wm page as well as a dependency i don't tend to use it where the lemon bar uses it for things like the time and date i've no idea but if we just move over to six again workspace six again we've got different wallpaper and that's your lemon bar config okay so whatever you want to use you can use poly bar you can use x-mobile you can use lemon bar whether you can use any other bars i've no idea but it's pretty simple to get up and running so let's just go and have a look at uh those files that are in the directory i didn't find a configuration file to download from the github page uh so when i first signed in i didn't quite know what the situation would be but it also generated this file for me called m t config.tmt o m l in fact let me move to workspace four and just move back one it put this config t o m l in the left wm directory so this is all of your key bindings and it's really pretty straightforward so your mod 4 key your windows key is your basic mod key here we have nine tags which are your workspaces if you like although it calls them tags i've always found it quite strange having nine tags why not eight or six or ten but anyway you have nine tanks to start off with and you can see what we're labelled uh you've got d menu um linked to super p and you can see i can bring that up by doing super p you've got alacrity there mod shift return as the default terminal and then you can close windows with mod shift q you can do a soft reload with mod shift r they've got slock which is a screen locker and that's just uh running the the command slot mod control l move to last workspace swap tags so swap tag should be mod key w so if i hit mod key w right so that that literally brings my other screen over here and if i hit it again it sends it back okay fine um move to last workspace right so if i do mod shift w right okay and you can't see anything there but if i swap tags again by hitting super w you can see that what it's actually done is it's uh moved genie over to the screen display that was uh previously just had obs on so let me just try and sort this out so w there we go we're back again so um yeah pretty easy to to work you can move around with your windows you can move focus and notice that they do rather than using the uh vim keys the hjkl keys they tend to use the up key the down key the right key the left key etc etc but you can clearly modify these to suit yourself and if you've been using uh any form of tiling windage window manager before you're gonna customize this but it just gives you something to start with now inside each of the uh let me just move to four inside each of the theme files so let's go into basic poly bar for instance you have a range of different files the whole configuration of leftwm is done from these files so if i move back to genie we've obviously got the config toml and i've opened up the other files in the basic polybar directory so your theme dot toml uh is your border colors and the margin so your gaps and how big your border's going to be so it's just set up one at the moment so it's it's pretty pretty thin you've then got template dot liquid um this is this is quite an interesting file and i wasn't quite sure what to do with this to be honest uh but as you look at it what this actually controls is the colors here the colors on the workspace indicator on your bar so you can clearly change them to whatever you need them to be and right at the bottom here there's something called window title and through experimentation i found that it's this what it's showing you in the middle of the bar so if you deleted that uh you wouldn't have that in the middle of the bar anymore the window indicator or whatever you call it i don't like it so i can't tell you i've got rid of that in in my own customized one i'm not exactly sure what sizes dot liquid does um i can make neither head and a tail of that but i'm sure somebody will tell me you then have uh a poly bar configuration so if you've ever worked with polybar before it's pretty straightforward you then have a down file um and the down file seems to tell the window manager what to do if you come out of it so kill compton or pycom and kill polybar you have another file called change to tag no idea whatsoever what that is and i'll tell you what else is there there is um there should be an up file which i haven't opened and this is actually a bash script here and what this seems to do is it tells you the options to to load on startup so open pycom or compton whichever you've got installed set the theme set the background using fay and i'm presuming down here this particular section is something to do with uh figuring out how many monitors you've got so how many poly bars to actually start up so that's pretty much it and if i wanted to shut that obviously i just do super shift q not a lot more to it so let me show you what i've actually done right so you should see in front of you uh what i've ended up with it didn't actually take very long to uh get this set up i made a few changes to the polybar config and i changed some of the colors around so it all matches my nord theme i'm also using the awesome icons for the tags rather than numbers i'm using the noto color emojis and uh yeah you can even see i've got a little system tray there i've changed all the key bindings just to suit what i normally use so i can now just hit super and enter to open a terminal and super eq to close the terminal dead simple i can open my ropey which i use with everything and i can pretty much run everything that i want i've also replaced fey with nitrogen and uh i'm actually pointing polybar to some of my custom scripts i can also open most things here so if i wanted to launch for instance the braised brave browser there you go it's launched straight away on my github page and i can close it down just as quickly just to go over to those different files really simple to make changes to this uh i simply replace the tag numbers in the in the config.tonl file by pasting in um awesome icons no problem whatsoever changed all of my key bindings to what i'm used to in this file and in polybar what did i do i pretty much left a lot of the configuration as is it had these sections in for main bar zero main bar one maybar two main bar three etc and i think that's something to do with it also finds out how many actual screens you've got so i just left them as was when i started to remove them things went wrong what i did change though was that the bar base section i'm using the uh the basic poly bar as a as my kind of base foundation for here and i i added in the fonts i wanted to use so ubuntu nerd mono nerd font font awesome and the note color emojis modules right well i i just put in some of the modules that were already there but i also added in links to some of the scripts that i use and uh i got rid of some of the stuff that i wasn't using and you can see all i've done in the polybar config for these emojis is i've just pasted them in here so polybar is a separate thing all together but if you've ever used polybar before it's pretty straightforward um that up script was was pretty important as well um it starts pycom automatically so i left that as is um but i got rid of uh the command that launched fey and try and set the wallpaper and i just put in nitrogen and in fact what you can see here this is your startup file essentially i'm linking it to the marte authentication agent i'm doing a nitrogen restore when we start up i'm setting the keyboard layout to gb and uh a little thing there for a synaptic mouse actually i don't need this on this particular machine but that was for my laptop to make sure that the touchpad worked properly um so yeah i i'm pretty happy with it uh in terms of uh layouts you do have a number of different layouts um i've just got three terminals up here as you'll see i've still got the default key binding on this which is super control and the up key and if i just keep cycling through you can see it has a a number of different layouts but its default is the master and stack so the x monad layout and uh to be honest i stick with that i i don't really vary so i've been pretty pleased with it overall um it seems to be quite stable even though the release is only something like 0.2 um there's been a few little quirks the main one being i've found that if if i'm actually in uh left wm and i'm editing the config files there's been a few times where um the system has frozen and i've had to come out of it and re-log in but actually if i'm not messing around with the left wm files it's been pretty solid to be honest it hasn't got as many uh key bindings as the likes of x monad but what i find found is it has the key bindings that i use and i've stripped my xmo nad config down to the basics anyway um i just want to be able to move around and you know move windows to different workspaces and everything else and it pretty much does the job so x monad q tile left wm spec to wm the tags work in exactly the same way so i know for instance on on tag two i i've currently got obs running so you know if i click that the tags swap over so they're not independent of each screen there are well i've got eight tags now i've reduced it i've got eight tags shared between two screens so depending what you have running on tag one and two if you click at the top it moves over so yeah nothing more to say i'll i really like it let's go and have a chat right so uh that's leftwm um i like it i i think it's a decent window manager in fact i'd go more than decent i think if you're used to x monad or q tile or spectra spectrum wm or spectre wm i can never get that right you'll find it it's pretty much similar it's simpler to configure that's what i found it didn't take long to get up and running it seems relatively stable um i haven't had any problems over the last couple of weeks other than when i've been editing the left wm theme files and uh i'm certainly going to continue to live in it for a couple more weeks so another winner really like it um and rust seems to be you know one of those those languages that is really kind of making waves at the moment it's good to have options it really is and uh the fact that it's easy to theme and to instantly get something up and running um i i think is a real bonus for people who've never used a tiling window manager before um what do i want to say uh yeah you'll notice that at the beginning of this video i i replaced my patreon thing with uh a little uh join me on library thing it's not that i've dropped patreon but uh because i most definitely haven't but library i i'm really starting to think that it's gaining traction and i've been looking at it with some interest over the last week or so which is why i got a little join me on library thing i i think it's be starting to become um a real alternative to youtube people still need youtube of course they do that's where we get the views and everything else but if you want to download the video and watch it yourself uh you know offline and i i really like the uh the tipping system that they have there where people can tip you a number of credits if if they like what you've watched it seems quite fair to me so i'm going to be watching that with interest certainly over the coming months that's it for today uh as normal i would just like to say you know please guys join me on my facebook group it's a friendly group uh join me on library certainly and last but certainly not least thank you to all my patreons robert gary aristotelis storm picks stephen mike david richard thai phillip forrest patrick glenn magnuson skipper thanks guys your support has been absolutely tremendous that's going to be it for today hope you enjoyed this video see you next week

Channel: OldTechBloke

Views: 7,598

Rating: 4.9392405 out of 5

Keywords: oldtechbloke, otb, linux, oldtechbloke youtube, old tech bloke youtube, window manager, window manager linux, arch linux, linux window manager, best tiling window manager, tiling window manager vs desktop environment, tiling window manager linux, tiling window manager for beginners, rust, window manager written in rust, leftwm, leftwm window manager, leftwm tiling window manager, leftwm config, how to config leftwm, leftwm themes, distrotube, window manager tutorial, how to, twm

Id: jvfk380Pses

Length: 31min 55sec (1915 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 20 2021