FrankenWM

From FrankenWM:

FrankenWM is a dynamic tiling window manager (comparable to dwm or awesome), featuring the v-stack, b-stack, grid, fibonacci, dualstack, equal and monocle layouts out of the box. If you want to, you can add gaps between the windows as well.

Installation

Install the frankenwm^AUR package. Due to the absence of releases since 2020, you may want to try the frankenwm-git^AUR package.

Starting

From tty

Run frankenwm with xinit

Configuration

Configuration is done at compile time by editing config.h. There are lots of comments in the default configuration (config.def.h) which explain what the settings are doing.

Note For configuration changes to take place you must supply config.h within #Installation and rebuild and reinstall the package.

Usage

The basic usage includes opening a terminal (Meta+Enter), opening dmenu (Meta+r) and closing windows (Meta+c). There is a complete, sorted list of the default keybinds and explanations of the tiling layouts in frankenwm(1).

Panels

FrankenWM does not come with a panel included, but gives you the possibility to leave space either at the top or bottom for one, like conky or dzen. There are a couple of settings in the configuration for this space.

If you want to use FrankenWM's status in your bar, you can pipe FrankenWM to a shell script to parse the output and pipe it to a bar. Sample scripts to accomplish this with a few different bar are located here.

Troubleshooting

I do not see anything

This is normal behaviour, as FrankenWM does not come with a bar included or a desktop background, so after running frankenwm without anything else, you will probably see a black screen. See Panels above for information on how to add a panel to your desktop. Wallpapers can be set by using software like xsetroot, feh or hsetroot.

Have a look at the config.h used to build your currently running version of FrankenWM, which is located in the build directory. Make sure that both the shortcut to run the termcmd/menucmd command and the termcmd/menucmd itself are set properly to start an installed terminal/menu.