kiwmi

A fully manual tiling window manager for the X window system.

Concepts

Most manual window managers aren’t truly manual. They behave like a dynamic one sometimes. However, kiwmi is fully manual. It doesn’t become dynamic all of a sudden.

When a window is spawned without allocating space, it’s put in an invisible queue. Then you allocate space for the window; when the window is pulled from the queue, it goes into the aforementioned space. This solves the classic problem with regular window managers, where the window with a longer start time will spawn in the current tag (workspace) instead of the one in which it was opened in.

In kiwmi, empty spaces available for windows behave like a normal window does. You can resize and move around them. Ergo, you don’t need to re-learn how a tiling window manager behaves and works.

Configuration

Configuration languages are confusing. They are neither flexible nor easy to use. Moreover, it adds a lot of complexity to the program itself. kiwmi listens to a socket and offers a basic client, seed, to communicate with kiwmi. Much like how bspwm works.

This allows the user to write the configuration in any language, while also removing the need to have a custom hotkey manager since you can use external tools like sxhkd instead.

Dependencies

• libxcb

• pkgconfig (make)

Building

For the most part, configuration is done in config.mk.

1. Make sure to have the dependencies installed.

2. make

3. sudo make install

Contribution

You want to contribute? Great!

Future requests, bug reports and PRs are always welcome. Make sure you read the CONTRIBUTING.adoc. Note that pull requests without a valid issue are ignored to decrease the amount of duplicate work.

If anything is unclear, feel free to contact me.

If you don’t program but want to contribute to kiwmi, spread the world about kiwmi and star the repo.