How to Configure DWM

Introduction

DWM is one of the most lightweight window managers available for Linux. While the name stands for Dynamic Window Manager, it’s primarily focused on tiling window management.

What is a Tiling Window Manager? A tiling window manager automatically arranges and sizes windows on your screen, typically in a grid-like fashion. This differs from the common floating window managers found in macOS, Windows, and Linux desktop environments like XFCE, KDE Plasma, and GNOME.

A dynamic window manager is capable of managing windows in both tiling and floating fashions.

Are there any advantages in using a tiling window manager? For me, the answer is YES. It brings automatic alignment of windows, keyboard-centric operation, efficient use of screen space, and improved focus and productivity. Asides that, you look very cool if you use a tiling WM, just like when you use NVIM as your IDE. 😎

There are bunch of tiling window managers and dynamic window managers out there like i3, bspwm, dwm, sway, xmonad, qtile, hyprland, just to name a few.

DWM has only a few thousands lines of source code written in C, and you many guess the reason why it’s very lightweight. It only consumes 200-300 MB of RAM, while a typical floating window manager like GNOME usually eats more than 1 GB.

Knowing all these good thingies, why not give it a try? TL;DR: Let’s dive in!

Before installing and configuring DWM on my machine, I already had Arch Linux with KDE Plasma as my daily driver. Thus, you will likely need to bring some more/different hacks if your prerequisite Linux setup is different from mine.

Install DWM

Install dependencies

I skipped this step because dependencies were already met by my KDE Plasma setup.

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# Build dependencies
sudo pacman -S base-devel libx11 libxft freetype2 fontconfig

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# Xorg
sudo pacman -S xorg-server xorg-xinit xorg-xrandr xorg-xsetroot

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# Utils
sudo pacman -S git curl wget zip unzip firefox

Pull the source code

There’s only one correct way of installing every suckless.org app – from source.

Create a directory where you’ll download source codes from suckless.org.

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cd $HOME
mkdir .suckless
cd .suckless

Clone the DWM source repository.

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git clone https://git.suckless.org/dwm

I would recommend storing your fork of DWM in your own git repository like I did. (optional, you can skip this step and do everything locally)

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# add my fork repo url as upstream
git remote add upstream [email protected]:crazyoptimist/dwm-fork.git
# create a new branch where I will apply all my hacks
git switch -c hacks
# push the new branch to upstream
git push -u upstream hacks

Install DWM, ST, and DMenu

DWM has a default configuration that uses ST (Simple Terminal) as a terminal emulator. Suckless team developed ST but it doesn’t come with DWM. So you need to either install ST or modify the DWM config to use your favorite terminal emulator. In my case, I configured DWM to use Alacritty. Let’s get back to it in a few.

For now, just install ST and DMenu. DMenu is something like an application launcher.

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git clone https://git.suckless.org/st
git clone https://git.suckless.org/dmenu

Installing DWM is done by a single make command:

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sudo make clean install

The above command builds the C code into a binary, and copies it to a system’s executable path. That’s why you need sudo.

Same applies for ST and DMenu.

Now, install everything:

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cd $HOME/.suckless
cd dwm
make
sudo make clean install
cd ..
cd st
make
sudo make clean install
cd ..
cd dmenu
make
sudo make clean install
cd

Let it run on boot

If you’re using startx, simply add exec dwm at the end of $HOME/.xinitrc.

In my case, I already had SDDM installed with my KDE Plasma setup. Below approach will also work for other display managers like LightDM or GDM.

Create a desktop entry file for DWM:

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sudo vim /usr/share/xsessions/dwm.desktop

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[Desktop Entry]
Name=DWM
Comment=Suckless's DWM
Exec=dwm
Type=XSession

After rebooting, you will be able to select DWM in the login screen.

Use DWM for the first time

In a tiling window management system, the screen is split into two parts - the master area and the stack area. The master area holds only one window at a time, and the stack area holds all other windows.

By default, DWM is configured to have 9 workspaces, labeled 1-9. (I believe they are referred to as tags, not workspaces. At the time of writing, I am not yet clear on the distinction.)

You can do everything only with keyboard in DWM. To make this happen, there’s MODKEY. MODKEY is a keyboard shortcut combination prefix just like the prefix key in tmux. MODKEY in DWM is configurable, and it’s configured as ALT by default.

Here’re some of the default shortcuts in DWM:

Configure DWM

Every configuration resides in config.def.h, of which file name stands for “default config.h”. You can copy config.def.h to create config.h and apply all the config changes to config.h before you build & reinstall DWM.

Personally I prefer applying all my hacks to config.def.h and remove config.h before rebuilding.

Use a different terminal emulator

This time, I would decide to use Alacritty instead of ST.

Install Alacritty.

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sudo pacman -S alacritty

Open config.def.h with your favorite code editor and search for termcmd.

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nvim config.def.h

You’ll find below line where you can replace st with alacritty.

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static const char *termcmd[]  = { "alacritty", NULL };

Run the install command now.

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rm config.h
sudo make clean install

Reload DWM by quitting or rebooting.

Change the MODKEY

Locate this part in the config file:

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/* key definitions */
#define MODKEY Mod1Mask

You can replace Mod1Mask (indicates ALT) with Mod4Mask (indicates SUPER/WIN).

Use a different application launcher

This time, I would decide to use Rofi instead of DMenu.

Install Rofi.

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sudo pacman -S rofi

Locate this part in the config file:

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// ... snip ...

/* commands */
static char dmenumon[2] = "0"; /* component of dmenucmd, manipulated in spawn() */

// ... snip ...

Add these lines below the above section:

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static const char *rofi[] = { "rofi", "-show", "drun", "-show-emojis", NULL };

Locate this line in the config file:

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static const Key keys[] = {
    // ... snip ...
}

It’s where all key bindings are registered.

Replace dmenu with rofi:

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static const Key keys[] = {
	/* modifier                     key        function        argument */
	{ MODKEY,                       XK_p,      spawn,          {.v = rofi } },
    // ... snip ...
}

In the above code, XK is just a naming prefix, p is the actual shortcut key

Same way, you can create/edit other shortcuts. For example, I configured flameshot like so:

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static const char *flameshot[] = { "flameshot", "launcher", NULL };

static const Key keys[] = {
	/* modifier                     key        function        argument */
	{ MODKEY,                       XK_p,      spawn,          {.v = rofi } },
	{ MODKEY|ShiftMask,             XK_Return, spawn,          {.v = termcmd } },

    // ... snip ...
}

Reinstall and reload DWM.

Configure autostart

There is a staggering number of Git patches submitted by DWM users on the suckless.org website. Every patch exists to enhance DWM by adding an extra functionality or modify default configurations.

This time, I would decide to leverage a patch named “cool autostart”. There are a few other patches too, aiming for the same purpose.

Since you will likely want to use more than one patches in the future, create a separate directory for all patches and download them there.

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cd $HOME/.suckless/dwm
mkdir patches
cd patches
wget https://dwm.suckless.org/patches/cool_autostart/dwm-cool-autostart-20240312-9f88553.diff

Apply the patch.

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git apply patches/dwm-cool-autostart-20240312-9f88553.diff

Follow the instructions from the patch author. I only needed to add autostart items into the autostart array.

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static const char *const autostart[] = {
  "sh", "-c", "/home/snail/.local/init.sh", NULL,
  "feh", "--bg-scale", "/home/snail/.local/wallpaper.png", NULL,
  "/usr/lib/polkit-kde-authentication-agent-1", NULL,
  "mblocks", NULL,
  "fcitx5", NULL,
  NULL /* terminate */
};

Reinstall and reload DWM.

That’s pretty much it and thanks for reading thus far!

If you are a terminal aficionado, DWM is not at all complicated, and I believe you will likely become addicted. :p