herbstluftwm

The Compiler · 2013-03-10 11:14:10

Heya,

herbstclient --idle fullscreen

Then you simply get lines like this when fullscreen gets toggled:

fullscreen	on	0x2400041
fullscreen	off	0x2400041

Florian

dura · 2013-04-05 21:26:57

Thank you Thorsten for this great window manager, and to ninjaaron and doomicide and others for their contributions. Herbstluftwm has a nice freshness about it, and feels full of possibility.

trusktr · 2013-04-05 22:05:56

What's the browser used in this screenshot? http://herbstluftwm.org/img/hlwm-pseudotile-1.png

dag · 2013-04-05 22:13:06

uzbl tabed?

trusktr · 2013-04-05 23:43:35

Yup, sure looks like it. Boy does it look good in that screenshot with herbsluftwm.

jasonwryan · 2013-04-05 23:48:13

If you look in the stack, you will see that luakit has just launched...

XionZui · 2013-05-25 23:27:32

Hey there, I recently started using herbstluftwm as my first twm, and I have to say it's pretty great. I tried using i3 for a while as well, but it seems I can't live without the ability to have empty frames, the ease of setting up a layout with herbstclient load, and the workspaces being independent of monitors. That being said, I've run into a few minor inconveniences while using it that I'd like to be able to address. My intent is not simply to complain (and I hope it's not taken as such), and if there's any avenue I can take to address any of these on my end, I will gladly pursue it.

Focus follows mouse won't focus anything while an empty frame is focused
This leads to some confusing situations where I close a window, mouse over my second monitor and attempt to change workspaces, but the primary monitor will change instead. It will then focus a window on the new workspace there, allowing the window under my mouse on the second monitor to be focused. I then try to change workspaces back, expecting the primary monitor to change since it had just done so, but now the second monitor changes workspaces instead.
Somewhat related: there's no way to use the mouse to focus a monitor with no windows on it short of binding a mouse button to that function
My wm interaction is very mouse-centric, possibly because I'm new to twms or because I do a lot of web browsing, and I have my side mouse buttons bound to switch workspace up and down. Having to take my hand off the mouse to manually switch monitor focus if I don't have any windows open on one of my monitors is somewhat inconvenient.
Windows using true transparency will also have transparent borders
This seems to be related to reparenting, but awesome seems to have had this issue in the past and fixed it.
Windows sometimes resize their elements briefly when focused
Some windows seem to be slightly resized when they're focused while in a frame in tiling mode. The one I've noticed most recently doing this is pavucontrol. Putting it in pseudotile mode fixes it, but then it's prone to becoming smaller than its frame in some cases.
Steam run via wine gets along very poorly with herbstluftwm
I'm sure this is more a shortcoming of steam and/or wine, but it seems particularly inimical to herbstluftwm. When mapping new windows in floating mode, they will usually spawn nearly off the edge of the workspace, like so: example. The Dota 2 - Properties window is on the monitor on the left, but spawns almost entirely over the second monitor. When (and only when) Steam is on the second monitor, even context menus will be mapped in this way: example. That menu is from right clicking Dota 2 in the games list. Before I added the padding for conky, it spawned nearly off the monitor in the same way as the previous example. Steam also will sometimes show an error dialog that doesn't allow any other steam window to be focused while it's open. This can sometimes result in herbstluftwm becoming completely unresponsive while continually playing the error ding you get when attempting to focus a steam window other than the dialog. Usually this will resolve after a minute or two of this going on, but sometimes herbstluftwm must be manually killed.
Floating mode for dialogs
I know this is being worked on, but not having to spawn dialogs in pseudotile mode over a frame in max mode and then have them disappear if you mouse out of them using focus follows mouse would be really wonderful.

The Compiler · 2013-06-05 13:54:17

Heya,

first of all sorry you got no answer for such a long time. I guess all of us are quite busy lately

(disclaimer: I'm not the main hlwm dev, but I also wrote some patches and plan to start doing so soon again)

XionZui wrote:

Focus follows mouse won't focus anything while an empty frame is focused
This leads to some confusing situations where I close a window, mouse over my second monitor and attempt to change workspaces, but the primary monitor will change instead. It will then focus a window on the new workspace there, allowing the window under my mouse on the second monitor to be focused. I then try to change workspaces back, expecting the primary monitor to change since it had just done so, but now the second monitor changes workspaces instead.
Somewhat related: there's no way to use the mouse to focus a monitor with no windows on it short of binding a mouse button to that function
My wm interaction is very mouse-centric, possibly because I'm new to twms or because I do a lot of web browsing, and I have my side mouse buttons bound to switch workspace up and down. Having to take my hand off the mouse to manually switch monitor focus if I don't have any windows open on one of my monitors is somewhat inconvenient.

I agree it would be nice to have options to allow focus_follows_mouse to focus empty frames/monitors. Added that to my giant hlwm todo list

XionZui wrote:

[list=3]
[*]Windows using true transparency will also have transparent borders
This seems to be related to reparenting, but awesome seems to have had this issue in the past and fixed it.[/*]
[/list]

Not sure what you mean -- you mean when using a composite manager to set the transparency of a window?

XionZui wrote:

Windows sometimes resize their elements briefly when focused
Some windows seem to be slightly resized when they're focused while in a frame in tiling mode. The one I've noticed most recently doing this is pavucontrol. Putting it in pseudotile mode fixes it, but then it's prone to becoming smaller than its frame in some cases.

I think I know what you mean and also saw it in the past, but I have no idea how to fix it. I guess thorsten (the main dev) might want to take a look at that.

XionZui wrote:

Steam run via wine gets along very poorly with herbstluftwm
I'm sure this is more a shortcoming of steam and/or wine, but it seems particularly inimical to herbstluftwm. When mapping new windows in floating mode, they will usually spawn nearly off the edge of the workspace, like so: example. The Dota 2 - Properties window is on the monitor on the left, but spawns almost entirely over the second monitor. When (and only when) Steam is on the second monitor, even context menus will be mapped in this way: example. That menu is from right clicking Dota 2 in the games list. Before I added the padding for conky, it spawned nearly off the monitor in the same way as the previous example. Steam also will sometimes show an error dialog that doesn't allow any other steam window to be focused while it's open. This can sometimes result in herbstluftwm becoming completely unresponsive while continually playing the error ding you get when attempting to focus a steam window other than the dialog. Usually this will resolve after a minute or two of this going on, but sometimes herbstluftwm must be manually killed.

Meh... Probably also won't get far if I take a look at that...

XionZui wrote:

Floating mode for dialogs
I know this is being worked on, but not having to spawn dialogs in pseudotile mode over a frame in max mode and then have them disappear if you mouse out of them using focus follows mouse would be really wonderful.

This isn't really being worked on to be honest. As soon as I have time again I'll check if a mixed tiling/floating mode will be doable with hlwm's philosophy, and maybe implement it, though that's not that important to me.

You can use a second virtual HLWM monitor the same size than your real monitor, and display a floating tag there, that's the hack some people used in the past.

In the newest git head (since commit d041e5b) an extra click is required for a focus change if a pseudotiled window would get hidden by it.

Florian

XionZui · 2013-06-08 23:43:07

The Compiler wrote:

Heya,
first of all sorry you got no answer for such a long time. I guess all of us are quite busy lately
(disclaimer: I'm not the main hlwm dev, but I also wrote some patches and plan to start doing so soon again)

No problem, I understand these things take time and you folks have other things in life to worry about as well.

The Compiler wrote:

I agree it would be nice to have options to allow focus_follows_mouse to focus empty frames/monitors. Added that to my giant hlwm todo list

The bigger problem for me there is that focus_follows_mouse won't focus anything else while an empty frame is focused. I would be fine with being able to click to focus an empty frame too.

The Compiler wrote:

Not sure what you mean -- you mean when using a composite manager to set the transparency of a window?

Yeah, using compton, in my case, in conjunction with urxvt using a setting like:
URxvt.depth: 32
URxvt.background: [80]#000000
leads to the borders around urxvt becoming so transparent I can no longer tell which one is focused.

The Compiler wrote:

This isn't really being worked on to be honest. As soon as I have time again I'll check if a mixed tiling/floating mode will be doable with hlwm's philosophy, and maybe implement it, though that's not that important to me.
You can use a second virtual HLWM monitor the same size than your real monitor, and display a floating tag there, that's the hack some people used in the past.
In the newest git head (since commit d041e5b) an extra click is required for a focus change if a pseudotiled window would get hidden by it.

Ah, well. I just really liked how non-disruptive dialogs and such were in i3 during my brief time using it. You can have one open without having to worry about what tiling mode the frame is in or having your application resized and the dialog placed below it rather than the center of the screen. I'll look into that monitor hack. Having that extra click also should make things work a bit more smoothly.

milomouse · 2013-06-24 01:14:37

Before the thread drifts away, wanted to swing by and say how much I genuinely enjoy this window manager. A beautiful mix between manual and hybrid tiling. Still wish it had some sort of libnotify support and/or a native "osd" kind of like StumpWM or goomwwm, etc. Also, many great window managers seem to utilize `dmenu', which is unfortunate.. IMHO.

I have since dropped my beloved StumpWM (gasp!!) for herbstluftwm. I love how it handles splitting frames and focus recollection, as well as external versus internal focus. So, thank you! Hope this is still being developed.

mentat · 2013-06-24 07:37:50

You're definitely right milomouse, herbstlufwm is a piece of art!

But I don't agree with your wishes (friendly
I think it's a feature to let users choose others softwares to do what you want.
For example I use dzen [1] for osd, dunst [2] for notify and multiple launchers
like dmenu, bashrun2 [3], interrobang [4].

I'm a happy user of herbstlufwm because, imho, it's respect unix philosophy and
Thorsten and all contributors focus on what is important for a wm like herbstlufwm.

They don't ignore other components of a wm, they produce great software interfaces to
interact between them, in a standard way: the command line. So you can use
your preferred languages to extend herbstlufwm.

Many wm try to incorporate too many things, forget to specialize on the task,
or/and plug wizards levels languages (I came from ratpoison, and don't make the
jump to Stumpwm).

Thanks and big kudo to them!

But ... I accept if the dev go one day in an other way.
Finally they work on the wm they want for them , I'm *only* a collateral happy user ^^

[1]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dzen
[2]: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=126085&p=1
[3]: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=108362
[4]: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=160182&p=1

edit: typo

Last edited by mentat (2013-06-24 07:42:28)

milomouse · 2013-06-24 13:18:59

@mentat: Good points! I guess it's nice to have a more "modular" approach (most noticeably in 'bspwm') and the reuse of code as opposed to reinventing the wheel.

Maybe I will look into customizing some commands to send to dzen for announcing output. Or just use `notify-send' directly (I also use dunst).
Never really read up about `interrobang' -- I will look into that, thanks!

flexo3001 · 2013-07-13 10:13:43

Hey *!

After a long WM-hopping (i used awesome for 2 years, then herbstluftwm,dwm, i3, notion, spectrwm, xmonad) i (hopefully) finally reached herbstluftwm. back then i doesn't liked hlwm. but now i'm really happy with it. hlwm has the best tiling algorithm and works like a charm.
I have configuered it but miss one little thing. is there a function for switching between the current and last tag (like in dwm, awesome, i3)? if not, where can i call it for a feature request?

greetz, flexo

thorsten · 2013-07-13 14:52:43

flexo3001 wrote:

I have configuered it but miss one little thing. is there a function for switching between the current and last tag (like in dwm, awesome, i3)? if not, where can i call it for a feature request?

The command use_previous switches between current and last take. some people usually bind it to Mod4-grave (the backtick/tilde key left of 1 on us layout). You can request new features by writing to the mailing list herbstluftwm-devel at lists.sourceforge.net (for small features you also can join the irc channel #herbstluftwm on freenode).

flexo3001 · 2013-07-13 17:32:53

thorsten wrote:

flexo3001 wrote:
I have configuered it but miss one little thing. is there a function for switching between the current and last tag (like in dwm, awesome, i3)? if not, where can i call it for a feature request?
The command use_previous switches between current and last take. some people usually bind it to Mod4-grave (the backtick/tilde key left of 1 on us layout). You can request new features by writing to the mailing list herbstluftwm-devel at lists.sourceforge.net (for small features you also can join the irc channel #herbstluftwm on freenode).

Thanks for that! i mapped it to $Mod-Escape. now i'm 100%b happy

flexo3001 · 2013-09-29 10:46:33

Hey *!
Normally i'm using my laptop with an ext. monitor. the monitor is rightof with its right resolution.in hlwm i use them with detect_monitors. everything is fine. but next week i have to give a presentation with live hacking. so i want to see the same on laptop and beamer. now i'm confused what's the problem. i can set with xrandr both displays to the same, highest resolution they are sharing. but that's annoying --> 1024x768 isn't that nice. the nicest thing would be to set the external monitor as usual and share one tag over both monitors. is this possible? or any other configuration with near the same result?

thanks, flexo

The Compiler · 2013-09-29 17:46:48

flexo3001 wrote:

Normally i'm using my laptop with an ext. monitor. the monitor is rightof with its right resolution.in hlwm i use them with detect_monitors. everything is fine. but next week i have to give a presentation with live hacking. so i want to see the same on laptop and beamer. now i'm confused what's the problem. i can set with xrandr both displays to the same, highest resolution they are sharing. but that's annoying --> 1024x768 isn't that nice. the nicest thing would be to set the external monitor as usual and share one tag over both monitors. is this possible? or any other configuration with near the same result?

Viewing the same tag on two monitors isn't possible unfortunately :-(
For presentations, I use a small script (which I can't find right now) and pdfpc to have notes and stuff on my laptop screen and a full-screen view on the projector. But if you actually want to do live-hacking I guess you need to stick to 1024x768 and xrandr's --same-as

thorsten · 2013-09-29 17:51:10

flexo3001 wrote:

Normally i'm using my laptop with an ext. monitor. the monitor is rightof with its right resolution.in hlwm i use them with detect_monitors. everything is fine. but next week i have to give a presentation with live hacking. so i want to see the same on laptop and beamer. now i'm confused what's the problem. i can set with xrandr both displays to the same, highest resolution they are sharing. but that's annoying --> 1024x768 isn't that nice. the nicest thing would be to set the external monitor as usual and share one tag over both monitors. is this possible? or any other configuration with near the same result?

Hi, It is possible: Configure xrandr such that both monitors show a common area of size 1024x768. Then configure hlwm such that the common area is one hlwm-monitor and the remaining space of your laptop screen is filled with additional hlwm-monitors:

extres=1024x768
laptopres=1440x900
xrandr --output LVDS --pos 0x0 --mode $laptopres   # TODO for you: replace the name by correct output name
xrandr --output VGA-0 --pos 0x0 --mode $extres
herbstclient set_monitors $(herbstclient disjoin_rects $laptopres $extres
/etc/xdg/herbstluftwm/restartpanels.sh

Then you'll see three hlwm-monitors on your laptop, but only monitor 1 is visible at the external monitor

┌───────────────┬───────┐
│               │  Moni │
│   Monitor 1   │  tor  │
│               │   2   │
├───────────────┴───────┤
│       Monitor 3       │
└───────────────────────┘

To switch back to your normal setup, disable the external monitor in xrandr and then execute

herbstclient detect_monitors
/etc/xdg/herbstluftwm/restartpanels.sh

Last edited by thorsten (2013-09-29 17:51:22)

ibrunton · 2013-10-17 22:27:15

Is it possible to have a 1-pixel frame border in the tiling modes, and a 1-pixel window border in floating tags? Basically, I really like the frame border for tiling so I can see where I'm moving to and creating a new window, and I like having a border in floating mode so I can tell which window is focused; but I don't like the 2px border I get if I specify both frame_border_width = 1 AND window_border_width = 1. Is there some trick in the settings so I can have my cake and eat it too?

thorsten · 2013-10-17 22:29:41

you could enable the smart_window_surroundings, maybe this already solves the problem.

ibrunton · 2013-10-17 22:33:54

thorsten wrote:

you could enable the smart_window_surroundings, maybe this already solves the problem.

Yes, that does exactly what I wanted! Thanks!

I love this window manager. Thank you for all the work you've put into it!

ap_m · 2013-10-22 09:18:10

Thanks for this great window manager!
I was wondering if it would be possible to query all clients' title of the focused frame? (to output them on the panel, for instance)

thorsten · 2013-10-22 10:12:37

ap_m wrote:

Thanks for this great window manager!
I was wondering if it would be possible to query all clients' title of the focused frame? (to output them on the panel, for instance)

This bash command prints all window titles in separate lines, but only of those clients which are in the currently focused frame:

 herbstclient or . chain \
    $(herbstclient dump "" @ \
        |grep -ioE '0x[0-9a-f]*' \
        |sed 's/.*/, get_attr clients.&.title , echo/') \
    . true

ap_m · 2013-10-22 11:24:05

@thorsten: thank you for the tip!

wirr · 2013-12-06 14:58:34

hi Thorsten

Are there any plans to include a cycle_frame command?
One could probably script that functionality, but it would be much cleaner witch a herbstclient command.

The reason behind the need is that I would like to bind my keys as follows:
mod+h cycle_frame -1
mod+j cycle +1
mod+k cycle -1
mod+l cycle_frame 1
But without the cycle_frame I cannot reach all frames.

Thank you

Arch Linux

#326 2013-03-10 11:14:10

Re: herbstluftwm

#327 2013-04-05 21:26:57

Re: herbstluftwm

#328 2013-04-05 22:05:56

Re: herbstluftwm

#329 2013-04-05 22:13:06

Re: herbstluftwm

#330 2013-04-05 23:43:35

Re: herbstluftwm

#331 2013-04-05 23:48:13

Re: herbstluftwm

#332 2013-05-25 23:27:32

Re: herbstluftwm

#333 2013-06-05 13:54:17

Re: herbstluftwm

#334 2013-06-08 23:43:07

Re: herbstluftwm

#335 2013-06-24 01:14:37

Re: herbstluftwm

#336 2013-06-24 07:37:50

Re: herbstluftwm

#337 2013-06-24 13:18:59

Re: herbstluftwm

#338 2013-07-13 10:13:43

Re: herbstluftwm

#339 2013-07-13 14:52:43

Re: herbstluftwm

#340 2013-07-13 17:32:53

Re: herbstluftwm

#341 2013-09-29 10:46:33

Re: herbstluftwm

#342 2013-09-29 17:46:48

Re: herbstluftwm

#343 2013-09-29 17:51:10

Re: herbstluftwm

#344 2013-10-17 22:27:15

Re: herbstluftwm

#345 2013-10-17 22:29:41

Re: herbstluftwm

#346 2013-10-17 22:33:54

Re: herbstluftwm

#347 2013-10-22 09:18:10

Re: herbstluftwm

#348 2013-10-22 10:12:37

Re: herbstluftwm

#349 2013-10-22 11:24:05

Re: herbstluftwm

#350 2013-12-06 14:58:34

Re: herbstluftwm

Board footer