2bwm VS dwl

Distro is Arch Linux and WM is 2bwm

This is a great article and I remember reading it numerous times while I was implementing my own window manager.

For someone interested in working on a really fun and rewarding hobby project a WM is a great one to look into since there are so many resources starting from really small implementations:

- https://github.com/mackstann/tinywm

- https://github.com/venam/2bwm

- https://github.com/dylanaraps/sowm

- https://github.com/dcat/swm

- https://github.com/JLErvin/berry

Which are great at introducing the concepts and allowing you to grok the required libraries.

There are also a bunch of more full featured window managers which will introduce you to more advanced topics:

- https://github.com/baskerville/bspwm

- https://github.com/herbstluftwm/herbstluftwm

- https://www.nongnu.org/ratpoison/

- https://github.com/conformal/spectrwm

Gradually as you get more familiar with the ecosystem a few questions will come up:

Should I use X11 or XCB? - I personally used XCB and didn't find it too difficult to interface with, and there are a large number of implementations which use it (2bwm, bspwm, ratpoison, etc) so you shouldn't have an issue with learning more about it. But the documentation is pretty limited. If you are just wanting to write a toy WM than X11 is perfectly fine.

X or Wayland? - If you're wanting to write your first WM as a hobby project than I would recommend X over wayland just due to the much larger amount of reference material and documentation. You will have a much easier time getting your feet wet. Ignore the comments about X dying as it doesn't really matter for a hobby project, since the whole point is to have fun.

Feel free to check out my window manager which is an example of what just reading this blog post and getting inspired can result in: https://github.com/cfrank/natwm

wm: 2bwm

It's a pity 2bwm does not get the love :) https://github.com/venam/2bwm

Patching autostart:

If any of you have attempted to use SteamVR with DWL then you probably ran into the same issue I did. It doesn't have support for DRM leasing, so it can't actually show an image on the headset.

DWL

Have you checked DWL which is DWM for Wayland? I haven't tried it yet so I can't say anything more.

There's a python script called stacki3 that works both on i3wm and sway. There is also a dwm clone for wayland called dwl.

I currently use dwl which is much, much lighter than i3 and suits my needs. On my laptop I just don't have a window manager of any kind installed, I can get by with lynx and the TTY.

I wanted to try two wayland compositors out (specifically dwl and river) and cannot for the life of me seem to get it working properly. I am currently doing this inside a VirtualBox vm.

[0] https://github.com/djpohly/dwl