mwm — matteo's window manager

A deliberately small, dwm-flavoured tiling window manager for X11. Suckless in spirit: written in C, configured by editing a header and recompiling, few dependencies, little code.

The one big departure from dwm: mwm has no built-in keybindings. Everything is driven at runtime through the mwmc client over a pure-X11 IPC channel (tmux style). Bind keys to mwmc calls with any hotkey daemon (e.g. sxhkd).

Features

• Tags — one global pool of up to 100 tags, shared across monitors.
• Two tiling layouts plus floating:
  • ||| cols — equal, full-height columns.
  • ||= stack — one master column + the rest stacked as rows.
  • ><> float.
• window ≤ tag ≤ monitor model: a window lives in a tag; a tag is owned by one monitor. Move a window to a tag, or a whole tag (with its windows) to another monitor.
• Configurable gaps between/around windows (live-adjustable).
• Rounded corners for clients via the X Shape extension — works with no compositor (turn off if your compositor already rounds corners).
• Translucent three-segment bar (left: tags + layout, center: focused title, right: status), each segment a rounded "pill" with its own configurable background/alpha (alpha 0 = no background).
• System tray (freedesktop XEmbed) embedded in the bar.
• Status from the root window name, so slstatus works unmodified.
• Font support via Xft (with fallback fonts).
• Window rules: match by class/instance/title and/or _NET_WM_WINDOW_TYPE to auto-place a window on a tag (by name or number) and/or float it — including catch-all rules like "float every dialog/utility/toolbar/splash".
• Tag→monitor rules: assign default tags to a monitor when it appears.
• Control everything via mwmc (and query state for scripts/menus).

Build

Dependencies: libX11, libXft (+ fontconfig, freetype2), libXext (Shape), and optionally libXinerama (multi-monitor).

make            # builds ./mwm and ./mwmc (creates config.h from config.def.h)
sudo make install

Edit config.h and re-run make to change settings. To build without Xinerama, comment out the two XINERAMA* lines in config.mk.

Running

mwm does not spawn anything itself. Start it from ~/.xinitrc and launch your status bar, compositor, and hotkey daemon alongside it — see examples/xinitrc:

slstatus &                     # writes the root name -> right bar pill
picom &                        # optional: real bar translucency
sxhkd &                        # your keybindings -> mwmc calls
exec mwm

Controlling mwm — the mwmc grammar

Everything hangs off the containment hierarchy window ≤ tag ≤ monitor. Two verbs do most of the work; a verb's target type is inferred from its subject.

# FOCUS — move attention
mwmc focus next|prev|last            # focus next/previous/last-used window
mwmc focus win next|prev|last|<class> # by direction, last-used, or WM_CLASS
mwmc focus tag next|prev|<name>      # view a tag (claims it for the focused monitor if unowned)
mwmc focus mon next|prev|<n>         # focus a monitor

# MOVE — relocate a subject into its container's neighbour
mwmc move win next|prev|<tag>        # send focused window to a tag
mwmc move win master                 # promote focused window to the master slot
mwmc move win mon next|prev          # send focused window to another monitor
mwmc move tag next|prev|<mon>        # move the current tag (+its windows) to a monitor
mwmc swap next|prev                  # reorder focused window within the stack

# LAYOUT & geometry (per-tag)
mwmc layout cols|stack|float|next|prev
mwmc master +1|-1|<n>                # master count
mwmc master ratio +0.05|-0.05|<f>    # master width fraction
mwmc gap +5|-5|<px>                  # window gaps

# WINDOW state & floating geometry
mwmc win toggle float|full|sticky
mwmc win tag <name>                  # (alias of `move win <tag>`)
mwmc win move <dx> <dy>              # nudge a floating window (auto-floats it)
mwmc win resize <dw> <dh>            # grow/shrink a floating window
mwmc win center                      # center a floating window
mwmc win close
# mouse: hold Super and drag = move, Super + right-drag = resize (config: movemod)

# BAR / session
mwmc bar toggle|show|hide            # show/hide the bar
mwmc traybar toggle|show|hide        # show/hide the system tray
mwmc reload | mwmc quit | mwmc version

# INTROSPECTION — for scripts, menus, and external keybinders
mwmc query tags                      # index, name, owner monitor, selected, occupied, layout
mwmc query windows                   # id, tag, class, flags, title
mwmc query monitors                  # geometry, selected tag
mwmc query layout | mwmc query state

mwmc help prints this reference. Commands return their output on stdout and a non-zero exit code (with an error: line) on failure.

How the IPC works

No sockets, no daemon, no extra dependency: mwmc opens its own X connection, stashes the command on a throwaway window, sends a ClientMessage to the root window, and reads mwm's reply back off that window (see ipc.h). Any number of mwmc calls can run concurrently.

Keybindings

There are none built in — that's the point. Map keys to mwmc with sxhkd (or xbindkeys, or your DE's shortcuts). A full example is in examples/sxhkdrc:

super + j            mwmc focus next
super + {1-9}        mwmc focus tag {1-9}
super + shift + {1-9} mwmc move win {1-9}
super + t            mwmc layout cols
super + shift + q    mwmc quit

Tags & monitors

• There is one global pool of tags (named in config.h; unnamed tags show their number, up to 100).
• Each tag is owned by exactly one monitor and its windows render there.
• A monitor displays one of the tags it owns at a time. The bar shows that monitor's owned tags that are occupied or selected.
• mwmc move tag <mon> hands the current tag (and its windows) to another monitor and follows it there.
• A newly connected monitor owns no tags (blank) unless a tagrules[] entry in config.h assigns one. Claim a tag for it with mwmc focus tag <name>.

The shipped config.h bootstraps tag 1 on monitor 0 so you start with a workspace; remove that tagrules[] entry for a fully blank start.

Bar, rounded corners & translucency

• The bar is clickable: click a tag to view it, click the layout pill to cycle layouts (right-click to cycle backwards), and scroll over the tags to step through them.
• The bar is one transparent window per monitor; the three segments are drawn as rounded pills. Each pill's background colour and alpha come from the matching colour scheme in config.h — set a background alpha to 0 for a segment with no background.
• Real translucency requires a compositor (e.g. picom). Without one, alpha is effectively ignored by the X server.
• Client rounded corners are done by mwm itself via the X Shape extension, so they work with no compositor. If your compositor already rounds corners, set roundcorners = 0 in config.h (and optionally enable picom's corner-radius). See examples/picom.conf.

Configuration

Everything lives in config.h (start from config.def.h): fonts, colours + alphas, gaps, border width, corner radius, bar geometry, layouts, default nmaster/mfact, system-tray placement, window-class rules[], and tag→monitor tagrules[]. Recompile and restart to apply.

Styling via Xresources (no recompile)

Colors, font, pill alphas, and geometry can be overridden at startup from the X resource database — handy for theming without rebuilding. Put mwm.* resources in ~/.Xresources (see examples/Xresources), load them before mwm starts, and restart mwm:

xrdb -merge ~/.Xresources && mwmc reload   # restyle live, no restart

mwmc reload re-reads the X resource DB and rebuilds fonts, colors, pill alphas, gaps, borders and bar geometry on the fly (it validates colors/fonts first, so a typo won't kill the running WM — it just reports an error and keeps the old style).

mwm.font:          JetBrains Mono:size=11
mwm.selbg:         #7aa2f7
mwm.statusbgalpha: 0xa0
mwm.gappx:         12
mwm.cornerradius:  8

Recognised keys: font; {norm,sel,urg,title,status}{fg,bg,border}; barbg; {norm,sel,urg,title,status,bar}bgalpha; borderpx, gappx, cornerradius, segradius, barpadx, barvertpad, barmargin, barvmargin, barseggap, mfact. Anything not set keeps its config.h default. The mapping lives in the resources[] table in config.def.h — add a line there to expose more.

pywal / wallust: those tools emit the generic *.colorN namespace, which does not match mwm's mwm.* keys — so mwm won't pick them up automatically. Map them in your wallust/pywal template (e.g. mwm.selbg: {color4}) — see examples/Xresources.wallust — then xrdb -merge … && mwmc reload (a good wallust post-run hook).

Testing in the Vagrant VM

A libvirt VM (Arch, dual QXL output) is defined in Vagrantfile; provisioning installs the build deps and test tools (sxhkd, picom, xterm, dmenu, slstatus's deps, fonts). The project is synced to /vagrant.

make vmup                       # on the host: bring the VM up
make vmconnect                  # attach a viewer

# inside the VM:
cd /vagrant && make && sudo make install
echo 'exec mwm' >> ~/.xinitrc   # plus slstatus/sxhkd/picom (see examples/xinitrc)
startx

Files

mwm.c          window manager
mwmc.c         control client
drw.{c,h}      drawing (Xft text, ARGB/alpha, rounded pills) — from dwm
util.{c,h}     die/ecalloc
ipc.h          IPC atom/protocol shared by mwm and mwmc
config.def.h   documented default configuration
examples/      xinitrc, sxhkdrc, picom.conf

Screenshots

Click to collapse

Default setup — cols layout with tags, bar, and gap.

Stack layout with floating window.

License

MIT Derived in part from dwm (suckless.org).