sowm VS patches

To add to the comment above, if memory is all you care about, I managed to get it down to 75MB once with custom kernel and sowm.

You can check https://github.com/dylanaraps/sowm It will be handy to you to understand how Dwm works

Or sowm.

I managed to get 75mb with X session on Void. (sowm + minimal kernel)

Then perhaps you should have a look at sowm. It is a fork (if you can still call it that) of dwm that has no tiling support and no bar.

If you are r/linux4noobs then you probably won't be able to get it running but... I managed to get voidlinux with sowm and a custom kernel to 70MB memory usage.

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

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