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I found out about tiling window managers as soon as I started to get into the Linux rabbit hole. I really loved how they allowed the user to create their own environment from scratch, or with a really minimal yet expansible base.
The first one I tried was Awesome[1], back when I was using Pop OS, which was my first distro. I used it for months, and I really liked it, but I didn't really understand it. The config file of this WM is written in Lua, and is extremely customizable, allowing for theming, widgets creation and so much more. But, since I didn't know the language, I copy-pasted code from the internet until I got something I liked. However, loading times got huge, and I did not know how to troubleshoot it, maybe a missing library or some code that was too resource heavy. The point is, that only the default themes worked fast enough for my liking. Ultimately, I decided to try something else.
I had heard about Spectrwm for a while, and tried it a couple of times, but I never managed to customize my bar panel successfully. But after watching Distrotube's video[2] on Spectrwm, I noticed that I made a pretty dumb mistake, I did not make the bar script an executable (yeah, I know, pretty obvious once you realize).
The bar can be configured in different ways, I just use a bash script, I named it `baraction.sh` and it is located in `~/.config/spectrwm/`, I followed Distrotube's config, and took some ideas from r/unixporn[3] I had to setup some colors inside my `.spectrwm.conf` file, which looks something like this:
# Bar Settings bar_enabled = 1 bar_action = ~/.config/spectrwm/baraction.sh bar_action_expand = 1 bar_border_width = 1 bar_border[1] = rgb:18/18/18 bar_border_unfocus[1] = rgb:18/18/18 bar_color[1] = rgb:2e/34/40,rgb:eb/cb/8b,rgb:a3/be/8c,rgb:bf/61/6a,rgb:b4/8e/ad,rgb:88/c0/d0,rgb:d0/87/70,rgb:3b/42/52,rgb:4c/56/6a bar_color_selected[1] = rgb:88/c0/d0 bar_font_color[1] = rgb:ec/ef/f4,rgb:2e/34/40 bar_font = mononoki Nerd Font:pixelsize=15:antialias=true bar_justify = right bar_format = +|L +@bg=0;+S +L +@bg=0; +@bg=8; +C +@fg=0; +|2R +A +@bg=0;+@fg=0; %a, %b %d %R +< +<
Spectrwm is can be controlled with a little program named wmctrl[4], wich interacts with EWMH compatible X window managers, and I can use it to make some interesting things. For example, Spectrwm does not play nice with polybar, trayer and similar tools. Since I use the default bar, I dont really have a problem with this for the most part. Nonetheless, I made a script that moves my systray to my current workspace, it looks like this:
#!/bin/bash
current_ws="$(wmctrl -d | grep '*' | awk '{print $1}')"
wmctrl -r panel -t $current_ws
I just run it inside of the bar script, so it updates at the same time.
I really love how spectrwm is so easy to configure in general, as you saw with the little snippet I shared, Spectrwm does not need any specific programming language to understand what is going on, just a bit of text formatting and some help from the manpage, and everything ends up working out. In the end, I have this is my current setup.
<figure> <img alt="spectrwm setup" src="/assets/img/blogs/2021-02-08-spectrwm1.webp" /> <figcaption>Typora, alacritty, pcmanfm </figcaption> <img alt="spectrwm setup" src="/assets/img/blogs/2021-02-08-spectrwm2.webp" /> <figcaption>Firefox, htop, kristall </figcaption> </figure>
There is still work to do, but I am really happy with the results, I am stilll playing around with other scripts and things. If you wanna get my current dotfiles, you can do so here[5].
Day 4 of #100DaystoOffload[6]
2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XK3KpLZdoO4
3: https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/
4: https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/wmctrl/