Suckless's dwm: So easy even a caveman could do it!

okay this is epic DWM suck Lass's dynamic window manager let's read some of the good stuff about it because DWM is customized through editing its source code it's pointless to make binary packages of it this keeps the user base small and elitist no novices asking stupid questions now I don't know how you guys feel about that but I am sold sign me up in fact at the end of this video you too can be small and elitist because DWM it's a little different if you're familiar with other window managers or especially I 3 but once you wrap your head around it it isn't too hard to understand but once you understand the logic behind it it all just clicks people have been trying to meme me into using DWM since I started my youtube channel now I'm using it I'm probably gonna continue to use it because I finally figured it out it finally makes sense to me so I'm gonna explain it to you I'm gonna get rid of this I'm gonna move that to another workspace actually I should say DWM doesn't actually have workspaces I shouldn't even say that really has tags we'll talk about the difference between them but of course you can move between them in the same way you move between them and I three you know Alt + you know a number or something like that that's the default binding at least I of course I change all the super I mean duh but you know so here's the idea behind DW 1 ok there are a bunch of different layouts there's a default layout a default tiling layout that looks something like this there are other layouts that you can get on you know the the website if you go to patches there's a Fibonacci layout I'll show you that one there's this centered master layout I'll show you that one but behind every layout there is one kind of logic and here's the logic it is a stack so if you have one one window you have one window into the stack when you create a new window that new window goes on top of that other window it is now the most prominent it when you create a window after that actually let me actually put stuff in these windows so you can tell them apart when you create another window on top of that it goes on top of the other ones it is now most prominent so I can type something else in here and then as you can keep creating them and the windows will be on top of the stack now what does that mean now obviously visually right now it is not on top of the other ones but I'll just say it's an abstract logic behind not just this layout but all the other layouts okay so here's the idea behind it here's I guess the mindset behind it your most recent window is the one that you're probably working in that you're doing stuff in and of course I can promote I mean it's not like this is constant I can go to my my webcam and make me the most prominent window and now it is moved from the bottom to the top moving over everything else down a layer or I can move this to the top at the top but the idea behind the stack as a kind of abstract reasoning system is that the window you spawn most recently or your most recently dealing with that is most important and it should be most prominent and then windows lower on the stack they're usually less prominent and they should be in a less prominent location you still want to see them you still want to do stuff with them but they're less important okay so this is what the default tiling layout looks like you have one master window on the Left which is the one that's on the top of the stack and you have a bunch of slave windows on the right okay that's the default layout but you can install other layouts as I said so that for example there is we'll start with centered master so the idea behind centered master I have this installed but when you press the binding for it it does this now the master is in the middle and if I create you know new windows they will become the new master right so I can do whatever I want here you know I can say you know new master ok so and of course when I you know let's say I want to make this the most prominent window when I press the binding to make put it on top of the stack it is now in the at the middle of it now the thing is compare this to the tiling layout they look very differently but abstractly they are the same the windows are in the same order when you scroll through them you can scroll through Windows with alt K and J and choose whichever one you want to move up to the front with alt enter but when you scroll through them on this layout they are exactly the same in terms of order as they are in this layout or you know additionally there for example is the fibonacci layout that looks something like this so let's say you know let's say the fibonacci layout well if as you may more windows basically your older windows you can see my face disappearing but your older windows will get smaller and smaller right or of course you can go back and you know make any of these you know the most prominent window you want if you want to get them up but the idea behind all of the layouts is they're all organized in a kind of stack format where the most prominent window again is the one that's most visible okay now in addition there's other stuff you can modify these layouts with geez I have so many of them so as an example actually so this again is the default tiling layout that usually it just has one master on one side and a bunch of slaves you can actually change this a little bit let's say I want two masters well you can press alt and I to create you know make it so you have one more master than you did before so when you spawn more windows you'll see that of course these newly spawned windows will still be the to master windows and everything else will be demoted but you still have to master windows right that's the point so now there are two spaces for that and when we promote an older window you'll see that they take prominence in these two master positions again pushing everything else down so that again is alt I or you can undo that with alt D I think yeah I changed some of the bindings but so you can move actually multiple windows back and forth I mean if you want to I didn't mean to make all those but you can move multiple windows into the master position or you know move everything into the slave position or whatever but that's the idea behind it but the order behind the windows is always the same until you specifically tell one to be promoted okay that's hopefully that makes sense okay so let's do a little more let's do show you some more layouts just as an example so I showed you um so there are a couple of other layouts again most of these you have to get patches for there for example is a grid layout which looks something like oops I did not mean to start I press through the wrong keyboard shortcut but they have a grid layout that looks something like this and keep in mind the all the elements in this grid are still organized as a stack so it's like you know one two so this is master second you know and you can scroll through these because they're still ordered and you know I can order you know if I say you know echo first live I'll use fiblet second fig lit third you can change the layout and they will still be in that order or additionally there's a sintered master layout that's sort of similar to the one you know so there's the one I showed you earlier and then there's this one and notice again there are still two masters I can demote one of those by pressing D or alt D blood um anyway so that's the stack that is the idea behind spawning windows in d w1 that's the logic behind it and again you can get all the layouts you want you can make them how you want but that's that's the idea behind it now that's not of course all there is to say about DWM there's a lot more this won't be my only video on it but the other thing that separates DWM from something like i three is that it does not have workspaces it has tags now for an ether user using DWM it looks exactly the same so you have all these workspaces things that look like workspaces they're not workspaces but you have all these things that look like them up here so you can press alt+ any of the number keys to go to them or you can press alt shift and one of the number keys to move any of your windows to them so let's say I want to move this to five now it's at five I can go to five and look at it but tags are a little different because you can look at multiple tags at the same time so let me give you an example let's say I'm doing some intense development work over here you know I have all this important stuff pulled up now I could if I let's say I needed to go to my browser I could go over here to this tag and just look at the browser another thing you could do is you can look at multiple tags at the same time so I can press what is Alt alt ctrl and then you know the number a number of another tag and now that browser that is in nine has appeared here now you might say it to be clear we didn't move the browser to the first workspace or tag we're now looking at the first tag and the ninth tag simultaneously and as you can see the one that we had our windows on and the nine that we had our browser on they are both highlighted now if I decide to go again to one of them by going to all to one you'll see that the browser disappears of course it's still on all nine we can go to see it it's still there but you can look at multiple multiple of these tags at the same time additionally let's say I just wanted to move this window in the same way you can move windows to other tags you know alts and then the number you can press alt shift and control in the number let's say I want to move this to nine and if I hold down control it is now tagged for one as it was before and it is tagged for nine now so I can go I press the wrong binding I'll shift control sorry yeah my bindings again are different on my machine but you can now see that it is on nine and it is on one great so you might wonder so you'll see that there are actually nine tags here that are there my default zere there is no zero with tag there's no like tenth tag or something in i3 there's a tenth workspace but there's no tenth tag here that's because if you press alt 0 what happens is you activate all the tags simultaneously so now you'll see everything is blue we're looking at all the tags all the stuff on all the workspaces quote-unquote workspaces again they're really just tags and it by the same logic let's say hypothetically if I go to one of these other you know workspace or tags and see I'm saying it if I go to one of these other tags oh my poor face isn't here I want my webcam to follow me everywhere well one thing I can do is I can mark that workspace is being tagged for everything so I can hold down alt and then shift and then press 0 to mean all tags so now that is on every single tag automatically so I wherever I go that face is gonna be on it ok now of course this doesn't mean it's not like it's running nine times or something silly like that it's just one instance tagged for all of these and of course if I get rid of on on one of them it disappears or if I close out of it on one of them it closes out on all the other ones although you can't let's say hypothetically I could send it to all tags ok so now it's everywhere again if I wanted to just get rid of it on this tag you can so I'm on I'm on eight right now so I could hold down alt ctrl shift and eight I think is that it no maybe it's just there's some binding that gets rid of it on only this tag I'll I forget what it is but you know there's some finding that just had another but closing out the window we'll just closed it everywhere to be clear maybe hold on I'm pressing I got to figure this out I'm long five okay yeah that's what it is alt shift control yeah I was pressing the wrong buttons yeah so now it's on everything except for five all right so anyway this has not been an exhaustive video so this is the idea behind dwm okay so two things there's the tag system and there's the stack system for ordering windows so if you want more ways to order I mean there's only one way to order your windows but if you want different ways to do find out how to display them go on suck Alyssa's website again there's the center mass centered master one that I had and the Fibonacci layout I installed those on the grid one as well grid mode there it is there so you can get different kind of you know different ways of looking at your windows but behind it all is the logic of the stack and again the logic is the thing that you are working on most recently it should be most prominent so anyway that sort of a world one course I'll talk more in other videos about modifying DWM as I do more modifications to it but hopefully that'll be clear enough to you know get the biggest brain concepts about DWM out there so I will see you guys next time

Channel: Luke Smith

Views: 186,138

Rating: 4.9224119 out of 5

Keywords: gnu, linux, tutorial, introduction, unix, philosophy, minimal, minimalism, minimalst, computer, programming, program, i3, i3-gaps, vim, emacs, vi, tex, latex, markdown, git, github, groff, arch, gentoo, distro, distribution, distrobution, ubuntu, fedora, thinkpad, floss, free, open, source, foss, software, dwm, suckless, stack, layout, i3wm, tiling, grid, awesomewm, awesome, bpswm, compile, patch, master, slave, queue, window, manager

Id: unqsQJaECv0

Length: 12min 25sec (745 seconds)

Published: Wed May 22 2019