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https://github.com/vidarh/rubywm

An X11 window manager in pure Ruby
https://github.com/vidarh/rubywm

ruby x11 x11-wm

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An X11 window manager in pure Ruby

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README 

        

# A Ruby X11 Window Manager



**WARNING**:



This is experimental. It will eat your cat and burn down your house,

format your hard drive and post all your secrets to Facebook.



Also it *will* likely crash on you.



If you're not comfortable figuring out how to recover from an X session

where your window manager is gone and lots of your windows appears to have

disappeared ... somewhere, and you might not be able to get focus to a

terminal window without switching to the text console, this is not yet

for you.



## So why should I run this?



You almost certainly shouldn't.



## But what is it then, at least?



It's a minimalist (currently <1K lines) pure Ruby (including the X11

driver) X11 window manager. It is focused on tiling, but allows you to

choose to assign a tiling layout to specific desktops or leave them

floating. Currently *whether or not you use tiling or floating layout*

there is *no window decoration* and windows are not draggable or

resizable by pulling on borders (but you can do that with Windows

key + left/right mouse button)



Like bspwm, which was an inspiration, the wm supports *no* keyboard

handling - all keyboard handling is deferred to separate tools like

sxhkd. Unlike bspwm this WM has no dedicated IPC mechanism. Instead,

so far, all communication happens via X11 ClientMessage events, which

means any tool, like xdotool etc. that can produce those events can

control the WM.



It currently does *not* do anything to facilitate working on multiple

monitors, as in my current setup I'm only using a single monitor for

my Linux machine.



## Screenshots



Note that most of what you see here is not the wm. The wm decoration is minimalist: a 1 pixel rectangular frame. Nothing else. But people want to see screenshots anyway, so here:












## Why did you write this?



It started with mild frustration that bspwm handled my desire for one of

my virtual desktops to have floating windows by default poorly. It's

possible, but didn't work great for me. It also frustrated me that my

file manager was visible on all the virtual desktops instead of just the

floating one. I also happened to know an X11 WM can be *really*

minimal to start off with.



So I ditched bspwm, and translated TinyWM - a really minimal C wm - to

Ruby, made that my main wm, and gradually started adding the features

I needed, drawing a lot of inspiration from the code of KatriaWM to

figure out how to make my experience gradually less painful.



This has been my only WM since that day, and I now feel that *I* have

rough parity in term of the features *I* use with bspwm. That does

not mean it will have parity for you - it lacks lots of things. It

also does not mean there aren't plenty of bugs, because there are.



## Will you add...?



Maybe. As long as it can either 1) be done with little code, and/or

2) be done by you, and/or 3) it can easily be kept as a separate gem.



Talk to me. But please respect I'm primarily releasing this "as is", and

I'm not committing to supporting this - I *do not care* if you decide

it doesn't work for you and is horrible. I'll think it's great if you

get some utility out of this code, though. But my goal is not a big user

base. Or *a* user base.



My goal is a functional, minimalist WM that works *for me*. And so, I'll

help if it's not compromising my own goal. To the extent our goals are

not compatible, I'm happy to e.g. split out generic/reusable

functionality so people can fork this and we can still benefit from

sharing the bits where we do agree how things should be.



## Pre-requisites:



 * sxhkd or similar is needed to handle input, as this WM does

 *not* listen to keybindings other than grabbing windows+ left/right

 mouse button for move and resize.



* A recent version of Ruby. I currently use 3.2.2



## How to run



This is a subset of my .xinitrc.



WARNING: You probably want to try this in a vm or something first and

see if it works for you:



```sh

  (sxhkd 2>&1 | logger -t sxhkd) &

  (cd ~/Desktop/Projects/wm ; ruby rubywm.rb 2>&1 | logger -t rubywm) &

  

  while true do

    wait

    sleep 5

  done

```



For most "normal" window managers, people tend to start the window

manager last and let it end the X session when it quits, but since

this is in development, I'm not going to do that because most stuff on

my desktop can survive my WM crashing and being restarted just fine,

as it should be, but will obviously get killed if the X session dies.



## Using with sxhkd



This is my related integration with sxhkd from my sxhkd config, but any

app that supports sending XClientMessage events can work:



```

    # Full screen

    super + f

    	/home/vidarh/bin/xclimsg -mpw focused _NET_WM_STATE 2 _NET_WM_STATE_FULLSCREEN 0 2

    

    # Shift Focus

    super + {Left,Down,Up,Right}

    	/home/vidarh/bin/xclimsg -mpw focused _RWM_FOCUS {Left,Down,Up,Right}

    

    # Shift direction

    super + shift + d

    	/home/vidarh/bin/xclimsg -mpw focused _RWM_SHIFT_DIRECTION 0

    

    # Swap node layout

    super + shift + l

    	/home/vidarh/bin/xclimsg -mpw focused _RWM_SWAP_NODES 0

    

    # Move

    super + shift + {Left,Down,Up,Right}

    	/home/vidarh/bin/xclimsg -mpw focused _RWM_MOVE {Left,Down,Up,Right}

    

    super + F1

    	/home/vidarh/bin/xclimsg -mpw focused _NET_RESTACK_WINDOW 2 0 0

    

    super + F2

    	/home/vidarh/bin/xclimsg -mpw focused _NET_RESTACK_WINDOW 2 0 1

    

    # Focus desktop

    super + {1-9,0}

    	/home/vidarh/bin/xclimsg -mp _NET_CURRENT_DESKTOP {0-8,9}

    

    # Move to desktop

    super + shift + {1-9,0}

    	/home/vidarh/bin/xclimsg -mpw focused _NET_WM_DESKTOP {0-8,9}

```



The `_RWM` events are custom for this WM. The others works on other

EWMH compatible wms.



xclimsg is from https://github.com/phillbush/xclimsg

I intend to "build in" the same client code in rubywm to avoid that

external dependency. Alternatively you can e.g. use xdotool or similar