Tuesday 15 September 2020

Fine tuning BSPWM

 I've been using BSPWM for some time now.  I had been rather bored with making the normal setups/configs for standard window managers for my linux boxes and started to look at tiling window managers rather than all in one desktops.

Eventually this lead me to BSPWM (via quite a few of the others,  honourable mentions to Awesome & Qtile) set off with a nice polybar panel.  

Here's what it looks like now:


I've played around with it quite a bit (not short of time these days!) even setting up a script to use rofi to display all my keyboard shortcuts.

I used a base of ArcoLinux which I highly recommend: they have builds for almost all the nicer tiling window managers right out of the box: and its easy to mix and match if you want to do that.   

The only real problem I've had was setting things up so that particular applications always worked on particular desktops.  Until I used a tiling WM I never really saw the point of desktops: but they are so practical and easy to use in a tiling setup.  Once I started using them I wanted to automate things so that I would always know the quickest way to find the window I was after.

This is rather more difficult in BSPWM than I'd hoped.

You need to edit your main config file for BSPWM to get these settings sorted: when you open up bspmwmrc with your text editor its easy to find the correct section to start looking at: (assuming you got a leg up as I did with much of the initial config coming from Arco) but quickly I found that many of my extra lines to specify desktops for particular programs were not working.  I did a deal of googling around which did lead to some results: but it seems inconsistent: working for some things and not for others.  

Anyway after much mucking around I include the section of code with my working setup: so you can copy some of these and use them for yourself without having to go through all the hoops I had to to get this working.....