My bstackmfact patch for dwm

I’m not much of a C programmer, but I did manage to put together my first patch for dwm, the popular and excellent tiling window manager. It updates the existing bottomstack patch to work with the current release of dwm and incorporates the functionality of the stackmfact patch. I call it “bstackmfact”.

To demonstrate, here is a video with four terminals open, colored distinctly to make things clear. You can turn on the bottomstack layout, and dwm’s existing commands let you adjust the boundary between master and stack:

But you can also adjust the width of the first client in the stack, which will distribute the remaining screen width equally among the other clients:

The keyboard commands that my patch defines are Mod+[h,l] for the first motion and Shift+Mod+[h,l] for the second, but of course you can easily establish your preferred shortcuts.

Dwm is not only the best window manager for daily use, but its short and sweet source code makes it possible to modify its behavior even if you barely know what you’re doing. Another example is this one-line change that I made to the source to eliminate a minor annoyance.

Every now and then I take a look at some new development in the world of Linux desktop environments, sometimes even taking one for a quick spin out of curiosity. I always find them vastly inferior to the dwm experience.

If you’d like to make your computer more responsive and get more memory at zero cost, ditch your desktop and install dwm. Far from sacrificing convenience and usability, you will enjoy a better interface and more fluid interactions with your system.