Dwm: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 05:16, 24 June 2025

dwm is an extremely fast, small, and dynamic window manager for X. It manages windows in tiled, monocle and floating layouts. This page provides instructions for installing dwm both from binary packages and from source along with dependencies.

Prerequisites

Internet connectivity, unless the packages have been pre-fetched into a local cache.
Install appropriate Graphics driver drivers for your hardware. Without graphics drivers, errors are likely to occur when starting your desktop.
A non-root user account.
The community repository must be enabled.
Set up eudev.
Install and enable D-Bus. Without D-Bus, icons and keyboard shortcuts may be missing.
Install Xorg

Installation

Installing binary packages

Alpine Linux provides binary packages for dwm (dynamic window manager), dmenu (dynamic menu) and st (simple terminal). This allows new users to experience dwm quickly without compiling the source code. To install the binary packages, issue the command:

# apk add dwm dmenu st

Proceed to Starting dwm section to start using dwm with default settings. If you are new to dwm, refer to the official dwm tutorial.

To customize dwm, refer Installing from source.

Installing from source

To customize dwm the source code written in c language must be edited, compiled and installed everytime for the changes to take effect, which usuaully takes less than a minute. If you have installed the binary packages, remove them first using the command: # apk del dwm dmenu st

Install dependencies

The following Alpine Linux packages are needed to install and compile dwm: git make gcc g++ libx11-dev libxft-dev libxinerama-dev ncurses libxft-dev

dbus-x11 package is needed for the dbus system as it enables Firefox running in dwm to open in a tile.

The adwaita-gtk2-theme adwaita-icon-theme font-dejavu are optional, but recommended for a nicer looking firefox.

The command to install all the dependencies:

# apk add git make gcc g++ libx11-dev libxft-dev libxinerama-dev ncurses libxft-dev dbus-x11 firefox-esr adwaita-gtk2-theme adwaita-icon-theme font-dejavu

Install dwm

The following instructions downloads the sources for dwm, dmenu and st in /usr/src/suckless, compiles the source code(make) and installs the binaries in /usr/local/bin. Use /tmp directory for downloading the sources, if you do not want to keep the sources.

Create a directory /usr/src/suckless using the command:

# mkdir -p /usr/src/suckless

Change to the /usr/src/suckless directory:

$ cd /usr/src/suckless

Download the dwm sources:

# git clone https://git.suckless.org/dwm

Once downloaded, go to the dwm directory:

# cd dwm

(or whatever it is) To install dwm, issue the command:

# make clean install

Next, go up one directory level

# cd ..

Download and install dmenu launcher:

# git clone https://git.suckless.org/dmenu # cd dmenu # make clean install

Finally, go up one more directory level:

# cd ..

Download and install st terminal:

# git clone https://git.suckless.org/st # cd st # make clean install

Configuration

The configuration of dwm and other suckless tools are done by editing the config.h file. The make command will create config.h file from config.def.h. If the file config.h already exists, make won't overwrite it and instead use it. Based on above instructions, for customizing dwm, edit the file /usr/src/suckless/dwm/config.h.

All changes related to keybindings, colors, fonts, patches, etc. are to be made to the config.h file and (re)compile the source code by issuing the command # make clean install.

Starting dwm

Change to your home directory:

$ cd ~

Create or edit .xinitrc with at least the following:

Contents of ~/.xinitrc

exec dwm

Next, create or edit .profile with at least the following:

Contents of ~/.profile

startx

Note: If you install additional programs that call your `$SHELL` with the POSIX `-l` login flag, you'll need to make launching `startx` conditional, otherwise X will attempt to launch every time your shell is called with the login flag.