Living in Dwm for Two Weeks: A Review

For the past couple of weeks I have been running my new build of suckless's dwm (the dynamic window manager.) Unlike i3, it doesn't have any unnecessary features and all the configuration is done in the source code (pretty much where you edit the config file, compile it and then restart dwm.) Another thing about having the config i the source code is you can package it like what DIstrotube did.

When you start it up without any customization you will notice that the bar at the top says the the version of Dwm. To change it you use then xsetroot -name command. Here is an example:

xsetroot -name "DONT PANIC"

To make it show information, You make a script and then you loop it to run the xsetroot command every x seconds. This is obviously a bit harder than anything with i3.

Another thing about dwm that is different is that it's dynamic. If on i3 you open 5 terminals, It will all be separate columns. In dwm it will have a master:stack layout where one terminal will have half the screen and the others will take the other half with there own rows.

What i3 is trying to do is where you go and put down a terminal, then you set where the next terminal goes. i3's idea is much better if you want to micromanage your windows; dwm is good if you just want it to work. However.

Dwm was much harder to work with because unlike i3, it doesn't have amazing documentation. Except for small things, you have to figure it all out by reading the config/reading blog posts by other people like me. So in the end it was a bit harder to get into. Although Luke Smith is making me think that might be a good thing.

Another thing about dwm is it uses patches. Rather than having seperate packages for i3 and i3-gaps, you get dwm, then patch wichever gaps patch you want. This works well in a vacuum, but patches can fail and then dwm will have a hard time compiling. I haven't had that problem with dwm so far, but I have with st and dmenu.

Overall I think that dwm is a fine tilling window manager and I'm gonna stick with it till I have problems with it.

Check out my config! dwm | st