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Bspwm: A Bare-Bones Window Manager

Angad Sharma on April 13, 2020

The linux philosophy promotes modular software. Linux itself is modular. This ensures plug and play ability, extensibility, and customization to yo...
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Ghost

How would you compare it with i3?. Of the tiling WMs I've used: Awesome, Qtile, ratpoison, xmonad and i3 for years as my main wm, I like manual layouts. Is bspwm worth to try or is pretty much like i3?.

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Angad Sharma

I3 is amazing. When I shifted to bspwm though, I felt that it's fast as compared to i3. It was the little things, like window switching. I haven't done any benchmarks though. Secondly I loved the fact that bspwm configuration is just a shell script. Feels like home territory, and also means that we can do just about anything there itself, without adding a lot of external scripts. With i3 you often need external libraries such as i3-gaps for doing stuff but you'll see that with bspwm, it's not required. Yeah you have to use third party libraries, but there is a separation of concerns when it comes to configuration. Moreover, you can combine the best tools of every component to create a magnificent beast

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Ghost

damn, what I was afraid of, I'll have to try it. Now how can I keep using my machine knowing that maybe there is a better WM for me?, why are you doing this to me Angad? what have I done to you?, ok.. I guess I'll have to install it then...

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Angad Sharma

Hahaha best of luck. I hope this blog helps you

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Jeff Favret

Fantastic post. I am using dwm at the moment, and wanted something as minimalistic, but able to configure without recompiles / patching. This sounds like the solution. Plus I'm bad at bash scripting -- this will help me improve!

One question: How flexible is the polybar? Can you add things like current date-time, available package updates, weather, etc?

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Krishna

Man that's some great piece of work you did I'm currently using dwm will surely try bspwm.

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Angad Sharma

Thank you :)
Do share your rice when you have bspwm up and running.

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Philip Karlsson

Thanks for this thorough post. I've been thinking about making the switch from i3 for a really long time, and I think I feel ready to do so.

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Angad Sharma

Best of luck Philip. You're gonna have a lot of fun with bspwm

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jkling38

This is an awesome series! Thank you for taking the time to do this!

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Angad Sharma

Thanks a lot!

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TayLorWebK • Edited

Thank you very much, when I ran bspwm for the first time, I saw the empty black screen and I thought there was an error. 😅
You saved me of using a DE.

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TayLorWebK • Edited

Btw, here is my rice. (windows are in floating state)
dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/...