Combine The Best of Bspwm and XMonad, You Get Herbstluftwm!

Herbstluftwm is a manual tiling window manager that has a unique feature set. The layouts are based on splitting frames into subframes similar to other manual tilers like i3 and bspwm. It's workspaces (or tags) are monitor independent which is similar to tilers like xmonad and qtile. It's configuration is easy and the config file can be written in any language that you prefer.
REFERENCED:
► herbstluftwm.org/
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Your support is very much appreciated. Thanks, guys!

[@samuelschwager]

I prefer KarenWM, it lets you really speak to the window manager! ;)

[@gettriggered_ian3269]

Good juan

[@robert58]

Not bad

[@______9364]

I can't find any information about karenwm. Can you share the link?

[@clark_johannes]

@@______9364 Just go to any fast food restaurant or a supermarket and just... wait for that moment and bingo! Ding ding ding!

[@IAmOxidised7525]

@@______9364 its a joke

[@animeshsahu2803]

This is so easy and feature rich, while still being configured with a bash script. Also the locking feature while drawing is so efficient, I love this wm!

[@tuerda]

I have been using herbstluftwm exclusively for over 6 years now. I am very happy with it. In late 2013 I messed with many WMs trying to find the perfect one. I would try one, stick with it for a week or two and move on. Then one day I installed herbstluftwm and never changed again. It was not so much that I fell in love with it immediately, as there really wasn't anything about it that annoyed me and made me want to try something else. As time went on I developed a deep fondness for it, and I can hardly imagine ever using anything else at this point. HLWM is highly recommended. The only warning is the default colors. The first thing it will do is paint your whole screen a bright shade of green that may make you want to gouge your eyes. Change them, and you are good to go.

[@Natsumi170]

My favorite window manager. I'm glad you made another video.

[@SteveDaley]

Great job DT bringing some attention to herbstluftwm. I'm not into tiling WM's but I have enjoyed using this one on a laptop for a little while. Your video was well done. I'm looking forward to more content on this WM. Thanks DT.

[@man6513]

I've started to use herbstluftwm yesterday, and you uploaded video today, what a coincidence.

[@richardmonroe4208]

Very much appreciate your series on "Window Managers". You do drive me crazy a bit because I have tried several of your suggestions. Did try "Herb" but I think I'll stick to bspwm. For me it's easier to configure. You and Erik Dubois have opened my eyes to a different but neat workflow. Thanks again for all that you do.

[@DistroTube]

Glad to help

[@ungeskriptet]

"Herbst Luft" means "autumn air" in German

[@samuelschwager]

Korrekt!

[@Berntisso]

No, not "Herbst Luft", it's "Herbstluft" in one word!

[@Berntisso]

@Mr. Rich B.O.B That's the point. Compound words in German are written in one word. You better respect grammar

[@ENTMusic-cj7wt]

Verdammt. r/beatmetoit Netter username übrigens. :D

[@Berntisso]

@Mr. Rich B.O.B Sorry, I'm actually a native speaker of Norwegian (which work the same as German), not sure I quite understand your comment. The point is exactly this: English is not German. So you shouldn't use English rules for compound words on German words. He said neither "Herbsluft" nor "Herbs-luft", don't understand why you are taking that up. You can clearly see it sais "Herbs Luft".

[@gardnerjp1]

Great review - as always! Thanks for sharing!

[@andrewpalm2103]

HL is my favorite tiling window manager. I've used it with Debian, Fedora, and Arch. The dzen panel and stalonetray were a pain to set up, but once that was done, I really enjoyed it. I don't use it much these days, but I still have it as a choice on my display manager, so I can go back when I get the urge to tile.

[@jeetadityachatterjee6995]

I didn't bother. I went to polybar then xmobar. Xmobar is great

[@GreyDeathVaccine]

Great tailer. Glad you reviseted it. Although I was hoping you would tell about some advanced topics like joining adjacent frames, merging tags or listening for hooks.

[@DistroTube]

Great suggestion!

[@jerick1234124]

Hey DT and viewers. Just thought I would drop a nugget that I thought some might want in their config. For picture-in-picture (single float of a client) 'hc keybind attr clients.focus.floating toggle'. Found on FAQ from hlwm website and man page of course. Having trouble changing focus of clients after this use '$Mod-Tab' and '$Mod-Shift-Tab'. Also can't have client in Fullscreen layout (Good way to hide the floating client though)! Also embrace 'split explode'. Defaults to '$Mod-Control-Space'.

[@riseabove3082]

Top notch video. You explain things very well. You make these TWMs sound so attractive but I will stick to what I'm used to. Great video though.

[@AnzanHoshinRoshi]

Thank you, Derek.

[@tecbs]

I did not know it, I will prove it. Thank you

[@Geo25rey]

I hear you talking a lot about i3, awesome, and dwm. I wish you'd do a video on Sway window manager.

[@DistroTube]

Maybe one day!

[@censoredterminalautism4073]

@@DistroTube Same for me. When Wayland is finally usable I will install it on my perfectly functional GNU/Hurd machine, on my drive running the perfectly usable and not broken btrfs filesystem. It's fine to dream.

[@Geo25rey]

@@censoredterminalautism4073 Sway seems usable enough for me. A lot of software is switching to Wayland because of GNOME and KDE. So the only part that's lacking seems to be Xwayland.

[@enderger5308]

@@censoredterminalautism4073 Btrfs isn't broken for me. It works quite fine.

[@torsten.breswald]

cool, after i saw lot of your vids i tried out tiling wms, too, and at the end i stucked with herbstluft because of the flexibility of beeing a hybrid tiler and always thought the same that it didn't get the deserved attention of you, i like the possibility to save the whole layout with "herbsclient dump" to a file and read it back later, with a little dmenu script for example, i even have a "DT" layout, which is one main frame left and the other frame right with vertical stacking ^^ Oh and as a german i can easily pronounce it so that's no issue, hehe

[@Phydoux2112]

I think I switched to tiling WMs because of DT. They're incredibly easy to use and so much more versatile than a standard Desktop like Cinnamon or Gnome.

[@kriscoryn5202]

thanks for the tip a was always more a terminal user and dont like the overhead of the windows stuf so i'm migrating to an tilewm but there al so many to choose from i give herstbladeren (dutch easy to pronounce for me) a try now

[@mke7605]

K Coryn you mean “najaarslucht” I think? That would be a more accurate translation. So how are we going to translate XMonad? 🙂

[@busterbrown8830]

Nice go-tee (sp) .. looking good.

[@BrucesWorldofStuff]

Hay DT! Thanks that might be worth looking at! I'm liking Spectrwm still but willing to try others. The other WM are above my head to configure. Although I can get around in Awesome a bit... :-) Thanks for the video! LLAP

[@nicoloiguera9073]

Hi and congratulations for your channel! I am currently using i3wm but I am planning to switch to herbstluft or leftwm because they allow to uncouple screens and monitors. My only question is, you spoke about the possibility to have more than one screen on a single monitor, is it possible even the opposite? In some cases it could be useful to have one single workspace included in all monitors, so that when you switch to that workspace all monitors swithc to what you want (something similar to virtual desktops on Windows 10, if I can nominate Windows :\) Thank you and congratulations again!

[@Phydoux2112]

I'm sort of the opposite with the workspaces sharing the 3 monitors. Part of the reason I like AwesomeWM is that I have 9 workspaces on each monitor. That's 18 total workspaces. I never use that many but if I want 2 terminals open, I can open a terminal in workspace 2 on monitor 1, and then I can open a different terminal in workspace 2 on monitor 3. If I wanted to, I could open up a 3rd terminal in workspace 2 on Monitor 2. Same thing with VirtualBox. I can open the VirtualBox program in one screen and then open the VM on another screen. Both under the VirtualBox workspace. Some might not see that as a benefit but I really like that setup and the wide range of options with the screens and workspaces. But this looks pretty slick. I do like the fact that the config file is very easy to understand. I really like that.

[@traumatizedtumbler8425]

bspwm is a dynamic tiling wm. It uses the spiral or fibonacci layout by default.

[@bhavyakukkar]

bspwm is not dynamic. simple test: spawn a window, go back to the previous window, spawn another window. you no longer have a fibonacci layout. compare this with dwm, no matter what window you are on, a spawned window will be at the top of the stack and become the master

How you did that "workspaces overview"?

[@onejdc]

Random FYI -- herbstluft means 'Autumn Air' in German.

[@drishalballaney6590]

What do you use for network manager?

[@allenellsworth5799]

If it has to do with Autumn I should check it out. Cool.

[@jeetadityachatterjee6995]

Do you plan on doing a video on different kinds of panels/bars. I have used some but never feel I get the most out of them eg polybar xmobar tint2

[@DistroTube]

I was thinking about doing videos specifically about polybar and xmobar.

[@jeetadityachatterjee6995]

@@DistroTube Nice. I can't wait!

[@censoredterminalautism4073]

I use lxqt-panel because I'm a 30 year old boomer. Everything is themed to look like Motif because I use the Motif version of Emacs (because it's less buggy) and my OCD and raging autism don't like when one program looks different from everything else.

[@quarkquark1]

Brodie Robertson has some very good videos on Polybar.

[@caleblagrange7164]

Polybar is nice because it's portable but it has massive overhead. If you look into lemonbar you'd be surprised how much you can do with it.

[@mehdiboujid8761]

how can u record each monitor at a time? it was impossible in x11?

[@gatterlinux8426]

Is a wonderful wm but no.onr give him the credit he disserve

[@ZsoltDonca]

Hey, @DT! Why don't you make a video on swaywm, the tiling window manager for wayland? I think it would make an interesting video, considering that all the tools you need to configure your desktop are different than on a regular X11 wm. There is also not much content already on KZbin, so it would be something novel.

[@saosing04]

As much as I love Linux and all these distros, I feel I only use these cool features to open, close, save, and relocated things. Other than that the majority of the things I can use are basic applications that I hardly know how to use. I'm not saying this as a put-down for the OS.; but I would really like seeing work flows in an everyday business environment that could help me. ( I work at a university that has a windows ecosystem)

[@007arek]

Is it possible to be able to switch workspaces in bspwm natively or via a script?

[@nathanruben3372]

I believe you really do not need new frame to put new windows verticelly. You just need to switch layout with mod space

[@offeringaccount8599]

Help I cannot spawn alacritty in herbsluftwm 0.9.3 and dmenu not open

[@bhavyakukkar]

the command to open dmenu is dmenu_run I think. try running alacrity from an existing terminal (xterm probably). alacritty uses opengl, do you have that installed?

[@maagu-_-]

Kind of early :-D

[@chrly00]

Maybe revisit i3, but with dynamic tiling github.com/chlyz/i3-dynamic-tiling? This is a vacation project of mine and still to be considered a prototype, but most of the dwm/xmonad features I use are in place. There is also a development branch for sway being worked upon, which could be interesting for the wayland curious audience. The implementation is based on the python IPC framework and it is a showcase of what is possible to do with scripting the i3 and sway window managers. Just let me know if you are interested and I will help you in whatever way I can.

[@Marco-sz6mq]

What’s the font that you use in this video?

[@DistroTube]

Mononoki

[@davidyoder5890]

Derek - I've been watching your channel for a while now and I've come to really like your format. I can't really relate to the wm vs twm stuff, or some of the desktop customizations you go through. I'm an admin and have been using some variant of *nix for many years. It used to be my daily driver, but I've since needed to switch to Windows for a number of reasons, but I still maintain a good number of Ubuntu and CentOS servers. Anyway, I'd be really interested in some useful troubleshooting commands and steps to resolve normal issues. One thing I've always had problems with is backups. Why isn't there a really good robust, fail-proof backup utility for Linux? There are so many solutions for Windows but I feel like Linux lacks so much in "business" and "enterprise" features. Maybe I'm wrong - I'd love to be wrong actually. Do you have any tips here?

[@riseabove3082]

For gui - use Timeshift or Backup Tool (In Linux Mint by default) or like me I just use 'rsync -a --progress /backupthis/ /backuptohere'

[@davidyoder5890]

@@riseabove3082 I appreciate that. But I'm talking about things like file versioning, local encryption, sending data off-site. I think I sometimes get so frustrated with GNU/Linux because everything just seems so unorganized and difficult to maintain. Most Linux server distributions can do one thing really really well, but there are few to no desktop distributions that can cover all the bases of what a desktop OS should be capable of doing these days.

[@son_et_lumiere9]

About the way it tiles windows, that sounds like i3 with extra steps

[@1889990]

Well I haven't used it yet but since the config is just a bash script you should be able to easily chain commands. I guess the better control you get comes at the price of a lengthy config ;)

[@bhavyakukkar]

the windows in i3 are equivalent to frames in herbstluft and frames are dynamic containers. so those extra steps make it so that herbstluft may very well be the only hybrid twm

[@robbingoossens]

Hey DT, I was wondering if you can make scratchpads in herbstluft like you can in xmonad, could you maybe cover it in a future vid?

[@omervandenbelt]

A video about scratchpads in Herbstluft from one year ago: kzbin.info/www/bejne/oqWxqo2co8mBbsk

[@saltrocklamp199]

Cant't you use 'herbstclient pad' instead of messing with the resolution? Also I think you're actually missing a discussion of the difference between frames (manual tiling) and windows (automatic tiling). HLWM is amazingly powerful.

[@kriscoryn5202]

​ @DistroTube next request for a video i'm making a large collections of music and video files. A) I don't find a good system to organise these for the moment a sort of directory structured with names but how to tag of mark all these to find one by some tags B) and if i founded the searched files we looking for howto quick open a music/video player with a specific windows layout for example 1 music video's with a extra lyrics viewer of the song in a layout A 2 a song just the player with a mixer to change the volume in layout B 3 a workout video with two camera's to open and record the workout in always the other layout. can you give me guiding video how you do the job for this with some tiling manager of course or is there already one on you distrotube channel thanks for all the good video's you make

[@jacobhesse1975]

The easiest way to do this would probably be using `fzf` (fuzzy find) and a script that uses the file name/path you get back from it. The script would then check the file type (.webm, .mp4, .mp3) and open `mpv [path]` or your music player according to that. Not sure about the tagging system tho, but a directory structure is pretty good as a start for `fzf` (`ncmpcpp` has a tag editor and can search your songs, but that doesn't cover video files)

[@kriscoryn5202]

@@jacobhesse1975 thanks i look in it to use it in a script or so i had already found broot something simular but never looked for inplement it in a script good tip and go doing some research for option B to find howto open a window or multiple in a tiledwm with a layout always the same thanks for the tip i check the tools

[@kriscoryn5202]

note from : Torsten Breswald see answers for me "the possibility to save the whole layout with "herbsclient dump" to a file and read it back later" thanks

[@enderger5308]

Anyone else think that the audio balancing is off in this video?

[@zweitlander874]

:)

[@ketermeissner9898]

Make a video Ratpoison window manager

[@stillious]

ERBstluft

[@_MPP_]

Third!

[@DistroTube]

Confirmed.

[@agh0x01]

Instead of using $myTerm, why not use /etc/alternatives/x-terminal-emulator ?

[@N0zer0]

Hop to TinyWM

[@doniramdhani9198]

I just can say "hebsletufweem

[@slackernetuk938]

Indeed, German has a reputation for being pretty challenging for English speakers.😉🤣

[@mohammedmohammed519]

Why is it better than KDE?

[@Natsumi170]

Lightweight

[@soumyajitsarkar9005]

d-menu is not working on manjaro i3 edition installed through architecture....and i can't reinstall d-menu because of dependence issue... what should i do???

[@bhavyakukkar]

are you running dmenu or dmenu_run?

[@hchydra3666]

early

[@DistroTube]

Confirmed.

[@asswhole4195]

First?

[@DistroTube]

el-oh-el

[@manuelthallinger7297]

I wonder how it came to the name of herbstluftwm. Autum Air isnt that great, spring air much more, so frühlingsluft would be more fitting for a piece of software. But know that i wrote it, i see the problem, ü and english speakers dont work well together

[@earthrelated]

you talk way too much dude.you might have some good info but i can't follow you!

[@adjusted-bunny]

I find this topic terribly boring.

[@ratmeat161]

Ok

[@mjblcmichael]

Perception is reality. I find it intriguing.