dwm-win32 is a port of the well known X11 window manager dwm to Microsoft Windows.

It is recommended to run dwm-win32 as Administrator so it will catch all windows including those you ran as Administrator.

Description

dwm is a dynamic window manager for Microsoft Windows. It manages windows in tiled, monocle and floating layouts. Either layout can be applied dynamically, optimising the environment for the application in use and the task performed.

In tiled layouts windows are managed in a master and stacking area. The master area contains the window which currently needs most attention, whereas the stacking area contains all other windows. In monocle layout all windows are maximised to the screen size. In floating layout windows can be resized and moved freely. Dialog windows are always managed floating, regardless of the layout applied.

Windows are grouped by tags. Each window can be tagged with one or multiple tags. Selecting certain tags displays all windows with these tags.

dwm contains a small status bar which displays all available tags, the layout and the title of the focused window. A floating window is indicated with an empty square and a maximised floating window is indicated with a filled square before the windows title. The selected tags are indicated with a different color. The tags of the focused window are indicated with a filled square in the top left corner. The tags which are applied to one or more windows are indicated with an empty square in the top left corner.

dwm draws a small border around windows to indicate the focus state.

Usage

Keyboard

dwm uses a modifier key by default this is ALT.

MOD + Control + b Toggles bar on and off.

MOD + e Toogles windows explorer and taskbar on and off.

MOD + t Sets tiled layout.

MOD + f Sets floating layout.

MOD + m Sets monocle layout.

MOD + Control + space Toggles between current and previous layout.

MOD + j Focus next window.

MOD + k Focus previous window.

MOD + h Decrease master area size.

MOD + l Increase master area size.

MOD + Control + Return Zooms/cycles focused window to/from master area (tiled layouts only).

MOD + Shift + c Close focused window.

MOD + Shift + a Force rearrange.

MOD + Shift + Space Toggle focused window between tiled and floating state.

MOD + n Toggles border of currently focused window.

Mod + i Display classname of currently focused window, useful for writing tagging rules.

MOD + Tab Toggles to the previously selected tags.

MOD + Shift + [1..n] Apply nth tag to focused window.

MOD + Shift + 0 Apply all tags to focused window.

MOD + Control + Shift + [1..n] Add/remove nth tag to/from focused window.

MOD + Shift + j Move stack +1

MOD + Shift + k Move stack -1

MOD + [1..n] View all windows with nth tag.

MOD + 0 View all windows with any tag.

MOD + Control + [1..n] Add/remove all windows with nth tag to/from the view.

MOD + Control + q Quit dwm.

MOD + Control + l Log all window state.

Mouse

Left Button click on a tag label to display all windows with that tag, click on the layout label toggles between tiled and floating layout.

Right Button click on a tag label adds/removes all windows with that tag to/from the view.

Alt + Left Button click on a tag label applies that tag to the focused window.

Alt + Right Button click on a tag label adds/removes that tag to/from the focused window.

How it works

A ShellHook is registered which is notified upon window creation and destruction, however it is important to know that this only works for unowned top level windows. This means we will not get notified when child windows are created/destroyed. Therefore we scan the currently active top level window upon activation to collect all associated child windows. This information is for example used to tag all windows and not just the toplevel one when tag changes occur.

This is all kind of messy and we might miss some child windows in certain situations. A better approach would probably be to introduce a CBTProc function and register it with SetWindowsHookEx(WH_CBT, ...) with this we would get notified by all and every windows including toolbars etc. which we would have to filter out.

Unfortunately the SetWindowsHookEx thingy seems to require a separate dll because it will be loaded into each process address space.

COMPILING

To compile, dwm-win32 requires:

• Visual Studio C/C++ Build Tools and Windows SDK (You can use the Visual Studio Installer to download only headless c/c++ build tools and windows sdk without the full IDE)
• zig

Source code for dwm-win32 is written in C and uses zig cc to compile C to native code. You can install the Zig compiler by using scoop as scoop install zig.

build.cmd

• Remove -DNDEBUG and -O2 -s from build.cmd to build debug version.
• Update version in build.cmd before release

TODO

• support luajit
• show/hide child windows upon tag switch, in theory this should already work but in practice we need to tweak ismanageable() so that it recognises child windows but doesn't generate false positives.
• fullscreen windows, mstsc for example doesn't resize properly when maximized.
• Screensaver?
• system dialogs from desktop window
• urgent flag?
• window border isn't yet perfect
• status text via stdin or a separate tool
• crash handler which makes all windows visible restores borders etc
• use BeginDeferWindowPos, DeferWindowPos and EndDeferWindowPos
• optimize for speed
• code cleanups all over the place
• multi head support?

[ - introduce a CBTProc function and register it with SetWindowsHookEx(WH_CBT, ...) to handle window events instead of the current mechanism in WndProc which is based on the shellhookid and WH_SHELL because this only works for toplevel windows. See also the "How it works" section. ]