'SP'ecially 'A'dapted 'D'WM 'E'nvironment

This is my repository for a basic, fully featured “desktop environment” using the DWM window manager. My goal for this repository is to have a base environment that I can quickly deploy on various workstations that I own, as well as provide a platform that makes it easy to maintain that environment and make changes over time. If you stumble upon this respository, I hope to make this environment rather easy to deploy on your end as well, but as with all things of this nature, ymmv.

Note: This repository is a work in progress as I build the environment, installation scripts, and procedure. While I intend to write scripts that will make it easy to install the environment and its dependencies, I assume this repository will always require some tweaking, and will most likely be constantly changed as I adapt my environment to my various workstations.

The starting point for deploying my environment on a workspace will be the ./deploy-spade.sh shell script. It will run the user through a few questions ensuring some basic utilities are already installed to the user’s liking (things like st, dmenu, and an editor which I have seperate configured repositories for). The script will then proceed to build the DWM environment, download the needed dependencies, and copy their configurations to the proper places. Note, the entire script makes the assumption that the user has a working X display server already setup. Setting up the X display server is out of scope of this repo.

There are dependencies that need to be downloaded for both my build of DWM, as well as the peripheral applications I use for my environment. I am going to split them into dependencies needed for DWM specifically, and dependencies needed for my overall environment (other applications and their own dependencies).

To build DWM on its own, the gcc build tools need to be installed. This repo makes an assumption that standard commands like gcc and make can be executed on the target system. Other dependencies include the development files for libx11, libxft and libxinerama. The deploy script will attempt to install these dependencies, making use of a package command variable in the shell script that can be modified for your environment (defaults to using the xbps-install command for void linux).

The following is a table of features that this environment provides, along with any associated dwm patches and dependencies that are used to provide the specific functionality:

Note for rofi: I have included both the script used to launch rofi from DWM, as well as a whole folder of configuration of rofi themes, the latest can be found at this github repository.

Application config files for lf are included. There are additional instructions included in these configs to make the previewer work in the terminal.

Note, when a patch name is in bold, that indicates a config file or script should be present pertaining to that patch. When a dependency name is in bold, that indicates a config file or script shoudl be present pertaining to that dependency.

For my status bar region, I use the dwmblocks-async build to provide the status text to dwm. To accomplish this to my liking, I had to add a few additional dwm patches to support this.

My build of dwmblocks provides the system to script the functionality and contents of my status bar. To accomplish this, scripts are provided in the dwmblocks/scripts directory.

I have added files that allow me to launch emacs as a runit service. This works well because it pre-loads my emacs configuration and makes opening emacs buffers really fast.

While the service files should have been copied over, you will need to run the command that adds a new services directory, and symlink the emacs service folder to this directory so it is run.

The following is already added to the autostart script in .local/share/dwm:

runsvdir -P "${HOME}/.local/service/"

If I just sym link the emacs service folder .local/emacs to ths above directory, it should work. Comments at this link should also explain more: https://www.reddit.com/r/voidlinux/comments/uomxrx/how_to_daemonize_emacs_as_user_service/

I have added a function that works pretty well when using the hide_vacant_tags patch. Since that patch minimizes the tags shown in the tag bar to only those that have clients associated with them, I changed the way I select a tag to view by allowing the number keys to align to the visible tags shown in the bar. This means, using the viewoccupied function, using Mod+1 to view a tag views the first occupied tag, not just tag #1. Similarly, Mod+2 views the second occupied tag, and so on. This makes it really easy to switch occupied tags matching visually to what is shown in the tag bar.

Now, if I want to select a tag # where there is a conflict (say I want to select Tag #1, but the first occupied Tag is Tag #3), I have two choices. I can use Mod+Alt+Tag# to force-select the tag to view, or I can use Mod+0 to show/view all tags, and then select the specific one I want to view. This gives a couple quality of life options, but also flexibility, in choosing the tags I want to work with.