This post aims to present my config for my window manager.

Tiling window manager FTW

After spending some time using Openbox, I decided I didn’t want anymore to have to deal with windows repositionning and resizing, so I switched to a tiling window manager.

I first used Awesome for some time, and I still like it a lot. But some things were suboptimal, like when you click fullscreen on a YouTube video, it opens the new fullscreen window in normal mode, so you have to put it fullscreen manually, and that is not cool. So after trying out i3, I went with what the cool kids are using : bspwm (Binary Space Partitioning Window Manager).

Here is what it looks like :

This screenshot only shows one window, with tmux (3 panes and 5 windows), with vim (3 tabs), in urxvt (1 tab).

BSPWM

If you are used to Desktop Environnement, using such a WM can be destabilizing. Following the Unix philosophy (“Do one thing but do it well.”), this window manager only manages windows.

So you need to have a menu to launch apps, and maybe also a bar to show the title of windows, the virtual desktops, the time, things like this. For the WM, my config is here. Nothing fancy.

Panel

At the end of the BSPWM config, it launches the panel script. This little script allows me to have a bar at the top of my screen to display things. And this is where the fun happens, because the space for customizing is huge.

The script creates a fifo, and it’s piped to another script, which then outputs a string which is piped to lemonbar, a simple bar.

Have a look at the intermediate script: panel_bar, you can see at the end I’ve added some scripts. One to display the number of available updates, one to display the battery, and one to display the music playing thanks to mpd.

Pacman script

Quite simple and straightforward:

#!/bin/sh
n=`pacman -Qu | wc -l`
if [ $n == 0 ]; then
    echo ""
elif [ $n == 1 ]; then
    echo "[$n update]"
else
    echo "[$n updates]"
fi

File on GitHub

Battery script

#!/bin/sh
full=$(cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/charge_full)
current=$(cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/charge_now)
status=$(cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/status)
percent=$(($current * 100 / $full))
if [ $percent -lt 10 ];then
    if [ $status != 'Charging' ];then
        notify-send 'PLUG DA BATTERY'
    fi
fi
echo " ($percent) "

File on GitHub

MusicPD script

You can’t begin to imagine the hard work I had to put into writing this script:

#!/bin/sh
mpc current

File on GitHub

Now what is cool about this musicpd part in the panel, is that I can toggle play/pause and adjust volume with the mouse like I used to do with Awesompd back when I was using Awesome WM. To do that, I modified the panel_bar script by adding the right tags :

printf "%s\n" "%{l}${wm_infos}%{c}${title}%{r}%{A1:mpc -q toggle:}%{A4:amixer -q set 'PCM' 2dB+:}%{A5:amixer -q set 'PCM' 2dB-:}${mpd}%{A}%{A}%{A} ${pacman}${battery}${sys_infos}"

A1 is left click, A4 and A5 are scroll wheel.