Compiling dwmblocks-async on Debian Linux
March 24th, 2026
I ran into a small problem when trying to compile dwmblocks-async on my Debian (Trixie) Linux machine. Running make compiled everything, but the link phase failed with the message
Package xcb-atom was not found in the pkg-config search path.
After some floundering, I was able to resolve this by
apt install libxcb-util-dev
Now all is good and this excellent program works as advertised.
Colors work with the statuscolors patch, but the well-known spacing defect remains. The symptom is extra space at the right of the status line, because the color codes add spurious spaces to its length. For the moment I’m fixing with with an ad-hoc adjustment in dwm.c. (This has nothing to do with the dwmblocks-async program, of course.)

