I have added DWM tiling window manager to ArchBang for anyone who wishes to try it out. DWM is not in Arch repos so is included as a binary that you have to update every time you make a change to its config file [or patch it]. You will find everything in dwm folder in /home/ablive. As I do not ship ArchBang with base-devel meta package you will not have any of the tools needed to rebuild dwm which I will get onto later in this post.
First lets get DWM up and running, edit ~/.xinitrc and remove the ‘#’ from the startdwm line. Save file then exit Openbox from main menu or from a terminal [openbox –exit].
You should then see this screen:
Bindings are different to Openbox so I will give you some useful ones [at least for me anyway!]
Super + Enter opens a terminal
Super + p Launcher [dmenu]
Super + [1-9] switch tag
Super + Shift + c closes a window
Super + Shift + q closes DWM session
Making changes are more complicated but you will only learn by trying 😉
If you have a working network connection the following will work live or installed.
Open a terminal and run:
sudo pacman -Sy base-devel –needed
Go into dwm directory
cd ~/dwm
Edit config.h file you will see a line near the top of file [line 7 in my case] that says topbar change the 0 to a 1 [read comment at end of line]
Save file then run:
sudo make install
If all goes well….
Log out of DWM with Super + Shift + q
Now you should see pane at top of screen…
That is a brief overview of DWM and making changes, you can of course add patches for more functions and options. Think as I did when I first started with DWM it is a case of walking before running. More information at https://dwm.suckless.org/ and arch wiki https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Dwm
