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.
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!
The following command should work:
make installThis 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
doneWrapping 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