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X11-korgwm-6.1
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korgwm: pure Perl tiling window manager by KorG

Joke

No, it is not a joke.

Why?

Back in 2010 I used the most impressive WM I think — WMFS (version 1). Then WMFS author (@xorg62) decided to completely drop WMFS and started working on WMFS2. It lacks a lot of functionality: EWMH, Xft, always_on_top, ... And I solely supported my personal fork of WMFS: github.com/zhmylove/wmfs.

Over time new technologies emerged and new WM features were required to feel entirely at home, so I dropped WMFS too. Since that days I always had the idea of writing my own WM. "The way we spend our time defines who we are" — Jonathan Estrin. "Zeit, die wir uns nehmen, ist Zeit, die uns etwas gibt" — Ernst Ferstl.

What is?

korgwm is my personal WM. I do NOT want to make it highly customizable as I do know my wishes pretty well. I decided to write it in Perl, as Perl is the best language ever. This WM is not a proof of concept, nor a society-oriented pet-project. It is just my instrument that I'm using on a daily basis since 2023. In it's heart it uses XCB for X11 interaction, AnyEvent for API and event loop, and Gtk3 for panel rendering. It is not reparenting for purpose, so borders are rendered by X11 itself. It uses several X11 extensions: RandR, Xinerama, Composite, Xkb, and maybe more.

Functionality

Screenshots

By default windows are placed in a tiled grid. You always can tune it's size and location:

Tiled windows

Windows could also be floating (in any combination with undelying tiled ones):

Floating windows

There is an Expose mode to show all windows from all tags and quickly switch between them:

Expose all windows

... and many more.

Installation

As korgwm is written entirely in pure Perl, the installation is pretty generic.

For FreeBSD it is available from ports: x11-wm/korgwm. On ArchLinux you can install it from AUR.

Release versions are published on CPAN, so the installation is similar to other CPAN modules. Personally I like cpm:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/skaji/cpm/main/cpm > cpm
chmod +x cpm
./cpm install -g X11::korgwm

In case you want to build it from GitHub or do not want to use CPAN, a regular Perl way is:

perl Makefile.PL
make
make test
make install

Please note that it has number of dependencies which in turn rely on C libraries. To make installation process smooth and nice you probably want to install them in advance. For Debian GNU/Linux these should be sufficient:

build-essential libcairo-dev libgirepository1.0-dev libglib2.0-dev xcb-proto

And these for Archlinux:

base-devel cairo glib2 gobject-introspection gtk3 libgirepository xcb-proto

Configuration

An example configuration file is bundled with korgwm. Please see comments inside korgwm.conf.sample.

Supported environment variables:

| Variable name | Description | | --------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | | KORGWM_DEBUG | Alternative way to set the debug option | | KORGWM_DEBUG_API | If defined, debug_*() calls will be enabled in API regardless debug option | | KORGWM_DEBUG_CONFIG | If defined, Config.pm tries to read this file instead of a default list | | KORGWM_DEBUG_PORT | Port number API binds to. Useful to avoid EADDRINUSE running several korgwms |

Contribution

Yes, I do appreciate contribution. But it should not break the default behaviour of korgwm, as I'm going to tune it for myself. Though this is discussable in your PRs. Welcome!