emberwm

A fork of vswm with the intended purpose of usage within rootful Xwayland.

About vswm:

Probably the most stupid window manager ever created, written over an ancient relic of a library called Xlib -- a library so old that it preceded the birth of planet Earth itself.

• There are no workspaces.
• All windows are maximised.
• Windows can not be moved or resized.
• Only one window is visible at a time.
• This certainly isn't for everyone.

Screenshot: https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/pbf4wu/vswm_hello_friend/

But why?

Wayland desktops are becoming more usable by the day. However, a lot of otherwise very usable and interesting Wayland Compositors available do not support rootless XWayland, meaning, without any further complications, you can not start a graphical program without Wayland support.

Fortunately, these compositors can run rootful XWayland, which is essentially just a normal window that is a Xorg-display for legacy GUI programs. This is one of the recommended ways for the Niri-Compositor to run Xorg programs. This is unproblematic if you are okay not resizing your window and creating new instances of XWayland everytime you run a new instance of Xorg programs. Emberwm is supposed to make this process a little more comfortable though.

Usage

After configuration and installation, run

ember <your program> [arguments ...]

or just

ember

to get started.

Keybindings

MOD1 + Tab               focus next window
MOD1 + Shift + Tab       focus prev window
MOD1 + q                 kill window
MOD1 + Shift + r         refresh wm [*]
MOD1 + Return            st

[*] Resize and reposition windows. Useful when resizing XWayland.

Configuration

Modify the keybindings to your liking by editing emberwm.c.

Dependencies

You need the Xlib header files.

Installation

Clean.

$ make clean

Compile.

$ make

Install.

$ make install

All in one go.

$ make clean install

Uninstall.

$ make uninstall

You may need to run install as root. DESTDIR and PREFIX are supported.

Credits

vswm: https://github.com/fehawen/vswm niri: https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri

For vswm:

i3: https://github.com/i3/i3 dwm: https://git.suckless.org/dwm sowm: https://github.com/dylanaraps/sowm berry: https://github.com/JLErvin/berry tinywm: http://incise.org/tinywm.html katriawm: https://www.uninformativ.de/git/katriawm