Bspwm

bspwm is a tiling window manager that represents windows as the leaves of a full binary tree. It has support for EWMH and multiple monitors, and is configured and controlled through messages.

Installation

Install bspwm^AUR or bspwm-git^AUR from the AUR. You will also want to install sxhkd^AUR or sxhkd-git^AUR, a simple X hotkey daemon used to communicate with bspwm through bspc as well as launch your applications of choice. With commit 948b804, xwinfo-git^AUR is also required by the example configuration files.

To start bspwm on login, add the following to your .xinitrc:

sxhkd &
exec bspwm

Configuration

Example configuration is found on GitHub.

Copy bspwmrc to ~/.config/bspwm/bspwmrc, sxhkdrc to ~/.config/sxhkd/sxhkdrc and make bspwmrc executable with chmod +x ~/.config/bspwm/bspwmrc.

Documentation for bspwm is found by running man bspwm.

There is also documentation for sxhkd found by running man sxhkd.

These two files are where you will be setting wm settings and keybindings, respectively.

Rules

As of 948b804 window-specific rules were externalized. Be sure to take a look in the rules directory for example scripts to set rules. These scripts are required to run the example configuration file.

Rules can be created in a few different ways. Two such methods are below:

1. Place rulc and ruld in a folder that is in your $PATH and make them executable. This will enable an out-of-the-box method to use the rules in the example scripts.
2. Create a script that is called in your bspwmrc file that forms the rules. See Stebalien's post for example of how to accomplish this.

If a particular window does not seem to be behaving according to your rules, check the class name of the program. This can be accomplished by:

1. Running xwininfo and clicking the problematic window
2. Find the line where Window id is given and copy the value given (should be something like 0xc00007).
3. Run xwinfo -c <Window id> to get the class name.

Troubleshooting

The following environmental variables may need to be defined:

echo $BSPWM_SOCKET
echo $XDG_CONFIG_HOME

If either of these do not respond with a value, then go to your /etc/profile and add the following lines:

export XDG_CONFIG_HOME="~/.config"
export BSPWM_SOCKET="/tmp/bspwm-socket"

See also

• Mailing List: bspwm at librelist.com.
• #bspwm - IRC channel at the irc.freenode.net
• https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=149444 - Arch BBS thread
• https://github.com/baskerville/bspwm - GitHub project
• https://github.com/windelicato/dotfiles/wiki/bspwm-for-dummies - earsplit's "bspwm for dummies"