bspwm — A tiling window manager based on binary space partitioning

angelic_sedition · 2015-02-20 22:06:41

J. wrote:

sxhkd actually executes your shell (according to the man page).

Yes, but you don't need to quote/escape ^ in the sxhkdrc even with zsh as the shell.

pablox · 2015-02-21 02:19:11

angelic_sedition wrote:

J. wrote:
sxhkd actually executes your shell (according to the man page).
Yes, but you don't need to quote/escape ^ in the sxhkdrc even with zsh as the shell.

Yep... but those commands are not working. Everyone else that doesn't have `^` works fine. FWIW, using ^ as a meta character it's an option that has to be activated (setopt extended_glob)... so maybe it's the problem on how I'm starting the environment, that extended_glob is being activated *before* sxhkd...

---EDIT---

YAY, in fact was a problem on my setup... for some reason that I'm not quite sure, I was setting extended_glob in ~/.zshenv, which is a stupid idea anyway .

Last edited by pablox (2015-02-21 02:37:14)

pablox · 2015-02-24 19:50:34

After some days using bpswm, I'm finding something that I don't understand. When I just started using it, resizing windows, was fast and responsive. But now it seems sluggish and borders tend to tear a lot while moving them. I wasn't using any kind of compositor, and I'm still not using one. At first, I thought the problem was the terminal emulator the problem, but I turned back to st and the problem persists. Sometimes even it seems the borders tend to move after I stopped the mouse (I know really hard to explain ).

Any clue what could be the culprit? Or how can I troubleshoot the issue?

I have a fairly new laptop, i7-4770HQ CPU @ 2.20GHz real qud core, and an Intel Iris Pro, with 8gb ram.

o_caino · 2015-02-24 23:57:09

Have you tried starting sxhkd with the -f option (and a value, of course)? e.g. https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php … 6#p1479696

angelic_sedition · 2015-02-25 01:10:16

o_caino wrote:

Have you tried starting sxhkd with the -f option (and a value, of course)? e.g. https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php … 6#p1479696

What exactly does the -f option do? The description on the manpage is cryptic to me.

instantepiphany · 2015-02-25 01:25:22

angelic_sedition wrote:

o_caino wrote:
Have you tried starting sxhkd with the -f option (and a value, of course)? e.g. https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php … 6#p1479696
What exactly does the -f option do? The description on the manpage is cryptic to me.

I had the resizing issue on bspwm - and I believe it is because bspwm tries to resize (and therefore redraw) a window being rezised each time it receives an updated mouse position. Meaning if your mouse has a high refresh rate (many new mice have a refresh rate of 1000hz!) then as long as you are moving the mouse that is how many times it will attempt to redraw and resize the window each second. So I think the -f option limits how many times per second bspwm will resize and redraw the window regardless of how often your mouse updates. But I fixed my issue by lowering my mouse refresh rate before - f was introduced I think.

Edit: I checked sxhkd manual, and yes it does what I described.

Last edited by instantepiphany (2015-02-25 01:29:56)

angelic_sedition · 2015-02-25 04:42:40

instantepiphany wrote:

I had the resizing issue on bspwm - and I believe it is because bspwm tries to resize (and therefore redraw) a window being rezised each time it receives an updated mouse position. Meaning if your mouse has a high refresh rate (many new mice have a refresh rate of 1000hz!) then as long as you are moving the mouse that is how many times it will attempt to redraw and resize the window each second. So I think the -f option limits how many times per second bspwm will resize and redraw the window regardless of how often your mouse updates. But I fixed my issue by lowering my mouse refresh rate before - f was introduced I think.
Edit: I checked sxhkd manual, and yes it does what I described.

Ah so by motion events it means mouse movement. Thanks. I've never really used sxhkd for mouse movement which is probably why I've never noticed any problems.

angelic_sedition · 2015-02-25 05:50:54

I've been messing around i3 lately. I like its tabbed/stacked layouts not so much because there are actual tabs displaying the window title but because I like being able to move between full sized windows on the same desktop. I don't normally have more than two windows on a desktop, but sometimes I want to just have one visible at a time. Previously, I was foolishly swithing to tiled, switching windows, then switching back to monocle. Someone's probably already posted something like this, but now I'm binding super+h, for example, to this script. When the layout is tiled it will move to the left window like normal, but when the layout is monocle, it will cycle to the previous window.

if bspc control --get-status | grep -q "LT"; then
	bspc window -f left
else
	bspc window -f prev
fi

Also, is there a way to get sxhkd to work with this without putting it into a script, or does that just not work?

Anyone else have bindings that do different things based on the current window, layout, desktop, etc.? I'm using bspc control --subscribe to switch to a different sxhkd config on empty desktops so I can use the homerow/letter keys for desktop switching and for opening programs.

o_caino · 2015-02-25 12:51:23

super + h
    if bspc control --get-status | grep -q "LT"; then bspc window -f left; else bspc window -f prev; fi

pablox · 2015-02-25 18:30:20

instantepiphany wrote:

angelic_sedition wrote:
o_caino wrote:
Have you tried starting sxhkd with the -f option (and a value, of course)? e.g. https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php … 6#p1479696
What exactly does the -f option do? The description on the manpage is cryptic to me.
I had the resizing issue on bspwm - and I believe it is because bspwm tries to resize (and therefore redraw) a window being rezised each time it receives an updated mouse position. Meaning if your mouse has a high refresh rate (many new mice have a refresh rate of 1000hz!) then as long as you are moving the mouse that is how many times it will attempt to redraw and resize the window each second. So I think the -f option limits how many times per second bspwm will resize and redraw the window regardless of how often your mouse updates. But I fixed my issue by lowering my mouse refresh rate before - f was introduced I think.
Edit: I checked sxhkd manual, and yes it does what I described.

Thanks it did work!

Nevertheless, there's must be a bug in bspwm/sxhkd... for example, yestereday it worked fine for the whole afternoon, and today it worked for a while, and now it's getting the strange behaviour again. Which gets solved when killing/starting sxhkd with -f 50.

Anyway, to not pollute this thread I'll continue the discussion in the github issue.

angelic_sedition wrote:

I've been messing around i3 lately. I like its tabbed/stacked layouts not so much because there are actual tabs displaying the window title but because I like being able to move between full sized windows on the same desktop. I don't normally have more than two windows on a desktop, but sometimes I want to just have one visible at a time. Previously, I was foolishly swithing to tiled, switching windows, then switching back to monocle. Someone's probably already posted something like this, but now I'm binding super+h, for example, to this script. When the layout is tiled it will move to the left window like normal, but when the layout is monocle, it will cycle to the previous window.

Hey, cool... you read my mind! I was **just** looking into how to do this . Maybe a note in the wiki would help? (searching through bbs threads is a royal PITA .

J. · 2015-02-25 22:35:49

angelic_sedition wrote:

Also, is there a way to get sxhkd to work with this without putting it into a script, or does that just not work?

As an alternative to o_caino's solution, you can make longer scripts somewhat readable by appending '\' to each line, plus terminating all statements with ';' (at least in Bash).

angelic_sedition wrote:

Anyone else have bindings that do different things based on the current window, layout, desktop, etc.? I'm using bspc control --subscribe to switch to a different sxhkd config on empty desktops so I can use the homerow/letter keys for desktop switching and for opening programs.

This sort of stuff is pretty much the reason I'm using bspwm:

- super+s swaps the focused window with the biggest window on the current desktop, or with the second biggest if the focused window is the biggest; or, if there's a window in manual mode, it swaps with that window. super+t does a similar thing for --to-window.
- super+space toggles manual mode, and it chooses the window's longest axis automatically.
- super+n rotates the tree directly containing the focused window (it works out which DIR to pass to --rotate).
- I have an implementation of a 'desktop wall' as supported in many stacking window managers.

(Code is at https://github.com/ikn/config-stuff - in '.config/sxhkd/sxhkdrc-bspwm' and '.local/share/bspwm'.)

angelic_sedition · 2015-02-27 22:04:36

J. wrote:

This sort of stuff is pretty much the reason I'm using bspwm:
- super+s swaps the focused window with the biggest window on the current desktop, or with the second biggest if the focused window is the biggest; or, if there's a window in manual mode, it swaps with that window. super+t does a similar thing for --to-window.
- super+space toggles manual mode, and it chooses the window's longest axis automatically.
- super+n rotates the tree directly containing the focused window (it works out which DIR to pass to --rotate).
- I have an implementation of a 'desktop wall' as supported in many stacking window managers.
(Code is at https://github.com/ikn/config-stuff - in '.config/sxhkd/sxhkdrc-bspwm' and '.local/share/bspwm'.)

Some awesome stuff there! What exactly is a desktop wall though? Briefly looking over the code and looking at the description for compiz (which apparently has a desktop wall), I couldn't really figure it out. It seems that compiz doesn't actually have different workspaces/desktops but one separated by "walls." Is this like switching between window layouts without switching desktops (I noticed the windowmap/unmap at least)?

I really like the super+s idea; that's one I'll probably end up using. I admit I never use preselection (even though that seems to be something a lot of people like about bspwm). Maybe it's because I only have a laptop and usually only have 4 or 5 windows open in total. Do you (or anyone else) have any good examples (written or video) of where it's useful? The demonstrations I've seen just open up a bunch of xterms.

I thought of some other conditions to throw in to choose the action. For example, mod+hjkl for switching windows directionally is pretty normal, but I usually don't need to do more than switch left or right. jk are more conveniently located, so if there is no window below or above, they can act as hl instead. If there's no window/monitor to the right, then it could also go to the next desktop. Adding to previous thing for right/up:

if bspc control --get-status | grep -q "LT"; then
	if [[ $1 == up ]]; then
		bspc window -f up || bspc window -f right || bspc desktop -f next
	elif [[ $1 == right ]]; then
		bspc window -f right || bspc desktop -f next
	fi
else
	bspc window -f next
fi

This might get confusing though (don't know how often I'll accidentally switch desktops, so it might make sense to take out one or both of them.

Also think it might be nice to add a no-modifier key binding on empty desktops to go to the closest occupied desktop. I can't think of anything else cool at the moment.

aoba · 2015-03-01 21:51:39

I have two problems that I think are issues with bspwm because they aren't present when using a different WM (I only checked with Openbox):

The first happens when I run a certain fullscreen program, switch desktops, then switch back. I lose the ability to interact with that program, and often times (maybe every time?) that window stops updating its contents as well. Usually what I see when switching back is a 2px border on the left and top half of the screen, and the contents of the desktop that I just switched from. I have only noticed this with three games running through Wine: Heroes of the Storm, World of Warcraft, and Beat Hazard. I have not seen this happen with a non-Wine program; everything works as expected when switching to and from Chromium, Bastion (another game), GPicView, and VLC.

The second problem is one I noticed when researching the extent of the first: running the windows version of steam (through Wine) in bspwm is awful. Moving the mouse over the steam window (without clicking anything!) causes the window to move on its own (down and to the right). Trying to drag the window in any direction actually seems to do the same thing, only faster (using sxhkd bindings to move the window instead, e.g. Super + mouse1 and dragging, works correctly). The UI itself is sluggish and rarely cooperative, often taking several clicks to activate a menu (which will not always appear in the correct location). All of these things happen whether or not sxhkd is running.

I am using bspwm 0.8.9-5 from the official repos (grats, by the way ), and I can share my configs if it would help. Probably the only relevant setting is bspc rule --add Wine floating=true.

Any thoughts?

162er · 2015-03-02 00:55:52

Does anyone know how can i toggle visibility of a single window?

o_caino · 2015-03-02 01:34:34

162er wrote:

Does anyone know how can i toggle visibility of a single window?

xdotool can do that.

pablox · 2015-03-02 12:59:34

I'm looking for a simple system tray, (i3bar + i3status was perfect for my needs), but I can't find how to run i3bar alone without i3 (it seems it's not possible either).

I used trayer-srg with xmonad a while ago, but it always make problems getting over the rest of the status line.

J. · 2015-03-03 09:10:11

angelic_sedition wrote:

Some awesome stuff there! What exactly is a desktop wall though? Briefly looking over the code and looking at the description for compiz (which apparently has a desktop wall), I couldn't really figure it out. It seems that compiz doesn't actually have different workspaces/desktops but one separated by "walls." Is this like switching between window layouts without switching desktops (I noticed the windowmap/unmap at least)?

It's just giving the desktops a grid arrangement, which really means providing commands to switch between them as if they were arranged that way, directionally. So, I have a 3x2 'wall', and, eg. switching downwards actually goes from desktop 2 to 5. (The map/unmap is to force bspwm to reapply my window rules when moving a window between desktops - specifically, deciding where to place it in the new desktop's tree.)

angelic_sedition wrote:

I really like the super+s idea; that's one I'll probably end up using. I admit I never use preselection (even though that seems to be something a lot of people like about bspwm). Maybe it's because I only have a laptop and usually only have 4 or 5 windows open in total. Do you (or anyone else) have any good examples (written or video) of where it's useful? The demonstrations I've seen just open up a bunch of xterms.

I don't use it very often at all. It's mostly just when I have a few windows open on the same desktop and want to swap two specific ones without moving any others around. I can't think of any relevant layouts that come up often, though.

angelic_sedition wrote:

Also think it might be nice to add a no-modifier key binding on empty desktops to go to the closest occupied desktop. I can't think of anything else cool at the moment.

Oh, I like that. Personally I wouldn't care about it being the closest, rather just have it go to any non-empty desktop, but yeah.

Not sure I like having the same shortcuts perform different types of actions depending on context, but I'm sure some people would.

--

Recently I wrote a script which acts as a VLC wrapper, and determines whether to open the given file in a new instance or in an existing instance based on whether an instance is open on the current desktop. It's probably the craziest thing I've ever written. https://github.com/ikn/config-stuff/blo … ecific/vlc

aoba · 2015-03-03 18:11:32

aoba wrote:

I have two problems...
(...)
Any thoughts?

Both of my issues - switching to and from (some) fullscreen programs and steam being insane - go away if I configure wine to emulate a virtual desktop. This feels more like a workaround than a solution to me, but at the same time I have no idea if anything reasonable can (or should) be done in bspwm to address the problems.

162er · 2015-03-04 21:10:46

Does anyone know how can i select windows just hovering the mouse pointer? like in i3?

sdothum · 2015-03-04 21:19:02

bspc config focus_follows_pointer true

Last edited by sdothum (2015-03-04 21:20:29)

agahnim · 2015-03-04 21:45:18

162er wrote:

Does anyone know how can i select windows just hovering the mouse pointer? like in i3?

Focus follows mouse is a thing in bspwm. Have you looked at the man page? I miss things in man pages a lot, and its sometimes really hard to parse depending on the quality of the man page, but you can search for terms, and the one for BSPWM does give a nice, somewhat comprehensive detail of the various options and such.

thinusbaun · 2015-03-08 21:57:42

Hello.
I have a little problem with IntelliJ Idea on BSPWM.
I am running wmname LG3D, then running idea.sh but if there is any dialog window poping out, cpu is 100% for a few seconds. Not much but it is enough to start fan in my laptop. I have checked IntelliJ Idea on LxQt and there is no such problem.
Is there any help to use Idea on BSPWM without problems?

pablox · 2015-03-16 14:24:50

Does anybody if it's possible to make gapless and without borders only when the window is alone? Something like gapless_monocle, but for normal windows? (I can do it from sxkhd, but I'm thinking doing automagically for every lone window)

Šaran · 2015-03-24 23:20:16

Is there any way to add borders to lemonbar?
Rule below does nothing.

bspc rule -a bar border=on

mf · 2015-03-26 22:03:23

I installed bspwm today after a long time and I ran into a couple of problems. First is the one described a couple of posts ago, stuttering when resizing/moving windows in floating mode. I'm using compton, but the behaviour is the same with or without it. Tried it also with sxhkd -f 50 but it makes no difference.

The second one was also described a couple of posts ago, but I have some trouble understanding it. I cannot switch to a different desktop with super + 1/2/3... I can if I execute a command from terminal (bspc desktop -f dev).

The only thing different from the last time I was using bspwm is that I'm using fish shell now. Maybe that's the catch?

Arch Linux

#1501 2015-02-20 22:06:41

Re: bspwm — A tiling window manager based on binary space partitioning

#1502 2015-02-21 02:19:11

Re: bspwm — A tiling window manager based on binary space partitioning

#1503 2015-02-24 19:50:34

Re: bspwm — A tiling window manager based on binary space partitioning

#1504 2015-02-24 23:57:09

Re: bspwm — A tiling window manager based on binary space partitioning

#1505 2015-02-25 01:10:16

Re: bspwm — A tiling window manager based on binary space partitioning

#1506 2015-02-25 01:25:22

Re: bspwm — A tiling window manager based on binary space partitioning

#1507 2015-02-25 04:42:40

Re: bspwm — A tiling window manager based on binary space partitioning

#1508 2015-02-25 05:50:54

Re: bspwm — A tiling window manager based on binary space partitioning

#1509 2015-02-25 12:51:23

Re: bspwm — A tiling window manager based on binary space partitioning

#1510 2015-02-25 18:30:20

Re: bspwm — A tiling window manager based on binary space partitioning

#1511 2015-02-25 22:35:49

Re: bspwm — A tiling window manager based on binary space partitioning

#1512 2015-02-27 22:04:36

Re: bspwm — A tiling window manager based on binary space partitioning

#1513 2015-03-01 21:51:39

Re: bspwm — A tiling window manager based on binary space partitioning

#1514 2015-03-02 00:55:52

Re: bspwm — A tiling window manager based on binary space partitioning

#1515 2015-03-02 01:34:34

Re: bspwm — A tiling window manager based on binary space partitioning

#1516 2015-03-02 12:59:34

Re: bspwm — A tiling window manager based on binary space partitioning

#1517 2015-03-03 09:10:11

Re: bspwm — A tiling window manager based on binary space partitioning

#1518 2015-03-03 18:11:32

Re: bspwm — A tiling window manager based on binary space partitioning

#1519 2015-03-04 21:10:46

Re: bspwm — A tiling window manager based on binary space partitioning

#1520 2015-03-04 21:19:02

Re: bspwm — A tiling window manager based on binary space partitioning

#1521 2015-03-04 21:45:18

Re: bspwm — A tiling window manager based on binary space partitioning

#1522 2015-03-08 21:57:42

Re: bspwm — A tiling window manager based on binary space partitioning

#1523 2015-03-16 14:24:50

Re: bspwm — A tiling window manager based on binary space partitioning

#1524 2015-03-24 23:20:16

Re: bspwm — A tiling window manager based on binary space partitioning

#1525 2015-03-26 22:03:23

Re: bspwm — A tiling window manager based on binary space partitioning

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