patches VS moonwm

It would be possible to have gaps by default without wasting space, they would just be smaller. Current gaps patches waste even more space than 'resizehints = 0'. This patch appears to be a big challenge, but it would be very interesting to see it done. Something like the centered_size_hints patch but with better space/cpu usage would already be great.

I made this patch after that post for reference: https://github.com/bakkeby/patches/wiki/anysize-simple

I'd recommend that you have a look at the floatrules patch and alternatively if you need percentages then I have another patch called floatpos.

As for 1. you may want to consider toggletag which is a one-line patch which makes it so that when you do MOD+1 to move to tag 1 and if you do MOD+1 again then it moves you back to the previous tag (5 in the example case).

I believe the zoomswap, stacker and restrictfocus patches could help solving this problem. The functions needed to be changed probably are zoom and maybe pop. I tried to figure it out, but couldn't since I don't know C right now. But hopefully the information on this post can help, so one can fix it if he can and wants to.

You may also want to consider applying the barpadding patch for dwm into dmenu, this is easier to do than it sounds. I created an example patch a while back: https://github.com/bakkeby/patches/wiki/barpadding

It's difficult to make alpha and systray patches sing together. Use bakkeby patch that does them both: https://github.com/bakkeby/patches/blob/master/dwm/dwm-alpha-systray-6.3_full.diff

I had an example patch for that: dwm-desktop-6.3.diff

I am using my own WM MoonWM, which is based on dwm. It is probably not for everyone, but I think that goes for every WM (also it is probably not as stable as the "big" players). A common first WM is probably i3, but you really just have to try some until you find one that fits.

The main difference compared to other window managers is that in dwm when you switch tags the windows that are not shown are simply moved to a negative x position, whereas in most other window managers the windows become iconified which involves a few more steps like mapping and unmapping the window. I don't think this should make a difference, but there is a build of dwm that iconifies windows when they are hidden rather than moving them to a negative position if you'd like to try that out.

You can install instantWM on another distro. I myself wrote MoonWM, which is based on dwm and should support basic DE functionality as well as draging windows with you mouse. If you want to you can give it a try. Although I should also not that it is not as smooth of an experience, as many regular DEs and I don't plan an pushing any updates other than obvious bugfixes in the near future.

I have this implemented in this commit.

Have a look into dmenu, rofi and xmenu. They are all good at different things. The first two are keyboard driven and support a basic application menu by default. Xmenu is more like a context menu. For the most part you create the menus yourself with scripts. You can pipe stuff into their stdin and get the selected entry via stdout. Here is an example of what I use for my dwm build.

ControlMask should definitely work though and does so on my build.

Idk, but this is the ginormous list of patches I have applied on my build: