.Dd July 10, 2004

.Os

.Nm cwm

.Nd a lightweight and efficient window manager for X11

.Nm cwm

.Op Fl s

.Op Fl f Ar fontname

.Nm

is a window manager for X11. It was originally inspired by evilwm,

but was rewritten from scratch due to limitations in the evilwm

codebase. The from-scratch rewrite borrowed some code from 9wm.

.Nm

contains many new features which all concentrate on the efficiency and

transparency of window management.

.Nm

also aims to maintain the most simplest and pleasant aesthetic.

We will adopt the following notation:

.Bl -tag -width 10n -offset -indent -compact

.It Fa C

Control

.It Fa M

Meta (Alt on PCs)

.It Fa S

Shift

.It Fa M1

Left mouse button

.It Fa M2

Middle mouse button

.It Fa M3

Right mouse button

.El

.Nm

is very simple in its use. Most of the actions are initiated via

keybindings. The current keybindings are described below, their

functionality is described in more detail later.

.Bl -tag -width 10n -offset -indent -compact

.It Fa C-M-Enter

Spawn a new terminal.

.It Fa C-M-Delete

Lock the screen.

.It Fa M-Enter

Hide current window.

.It Fa M-Down

Lower current window.

.It Fa M-Up

Raise current window.

.It Fa M-/

Search for windows.

.It Fa C-/

Search for applications.

.It Fa C-M-l

Label current window.

.It Fa M-Tab

Cycle through currently visible windows.

.It Fa M-S-Tab

Reverse cycle through currently visible windows.

.It Fa C-M-x

Delete current window.

.It Fa C-M-Escape

Enter group edit mode.

.It Fa C-M-[n]

Select group n, where n is 1-9.

.It Fa C-M-0

Select all groups.

.It Fa M-Right

Switch to next group.

.It Fa M-Left

Switch to previous group.

.It Fa C-M-=

Toggle vertical maximization of window.

.El

The mouse bindings are also important, they are:

.Bl -tag -width 10n -offset -indent -compact

.It Fa M-M1

Move a window.

.It Fa C-M-M1

Toggle a window's membership in the current group. A blue highlight

indicates the window has been added to the group, a red highlight

indicates it has been removed.

.It Fa M-M2

Resize a window/Select a window.

.It Fa M-M3

Lower a window.

.El

The options for

.Nm

are as follows:

.Bl -tag -width Ds

.It Fl s

Set sticky group mode on.

The default behavior for new windows is to not assign any group.

This changes the default behavior to assigning the currrently selected

group to any newly created windows.

.It Fl f Ar fontname

Makes the

.Xr Xft 3

font string

.Ar fontname

the default font.

.El

.Nm

features the ability to search for windows by their current title, old

titles and by their label. The priority for the search results are:

Label, current title, old titles in reverse order and finally window

class name.

.Nm

keeps a history of the 5 previous titles of a window.

When searching, the leftmost character of the result list may show a

flag:

.Bl -tag -width 10n -offset -indent -compact

.It Fa !

The window is the currently focused window.

.It Fa &

The window is hidden.

.El

The following keybindings may be used to navigate the result list:

.Bl -tag -width 10n -offset -indent -compact

.It [Down] or C-s

Select the next window in the list.

.It [Up] or C-r

Select the previous window in the list.

.It C-u

Clear the input.

.It [Enter]

Focus the selected window.

.It [Esc]

Quit.

.It C-a

Whenever there are no matching windows, list every window.

.El

.Nm

has the ability to group windows together, and use the groups to

perform operations on the entire group instead of just one window.

Currently, the only operation that is supported is to hide and unhide

the grouped windows. Together with the

.Fl s

option, this can be used to emulate virtual desktops.

To edit groups, enter the group edit mode, and select/unselect the

groups with the group selection mouse click. A blue border will be

shown on the currently selected windows. The group selection keyboard

shortcuts can also be used to change which group to edit.

Menus are recalled by clicking the mouse on the root window:

.Bl -tag -width 10n -offset -indent -compact

.It Fa M1

Show list of currently hidden windows. Clicking on an item will

unhide that window.

.It Fa M2

Show list of currently defined groups. Clicking on an item will

hide/unhide that group.

.It Fa M3

Show list of applications as defined in

.Fa ~/.calmwm .

Clicking on an item will spawn that application.

.El

Any directory entries here are shown in the application menu. When it

is selected, the image is executed with

.Xr execve 2 .

One use of this is to create symbolic links for your favorite

applications in this directory using

.Xr ln 1 .

The entries

.Nm term

and

.Nm lock

have special meaning. When they exist they point to the terminal

program and screen locking programs used by the keybindings specified

above. The defaults for these are

.Xr xterm 1

and

.Xr xlock 1 ,

respectively.

.Nm

contains some code from 9wm.

The

.Nm

software has been developed by Marius Aamodt Eriksen

.Aq marius@monkey.org

with contributions from Andy Adamson

.Aq dros@monkey.org ,

Niels Provos

.Aq provos@monkey.org

and Antti Nykänen

.Aq aon@iki.fi .

Ideas, discussion with many others.