DWM initial setup and config. Icons, Bar Scripts, Keybindings, and Theming.

I go over how to get the latest version of DWM from the suckless website, make the binary, symlink it to your $PATH configure it to have a nice theme, icons for the tag names, and a nicely populated status bar...
Link to my build of DWM, DMENU, and ST
github.com/linuxdabbler/suckless
If you are interested in any of the scripts I used in this video,
here is the link to my github page... Use them as you wish...
github.com/linuxdabbler/perso...
KZbin
/ linuxdabbler
Twitter
@linuxdabbler
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@linuxdabbler
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@linuxdabbler

[@fiveten2791]

As a beginner, this is hands down the best DWM configuration tutorial I've seen! Thanks a lot

[@dinihtis]

Just right level of details for configuring DWM, I could not wrap my head around configuring status-bar, thank you

[@yashjha0007]

This is the best tutorial I've seen on dwm. So calm and informative. Thank you kind sir!

[@habituallearner7680]

This is genius! Seriously, this is one of the best Linux instructional videos I've ever seen. I know You have a video on the newer version but this was easy to follow and for once everything made sense to me. DWM installation and configuration have been somewhat intimidating to me in the past but I love this WM and in particular your setup. I am a happy new subscriber.

[@blackie5566]

Again many thanks to you, i made a clean install and followed your steps, now DWM works great, thanks to you 👍😎. Thank you so much 👍

[@johnnynodoe]

The only non cringe Linux KZbinr, and you really couldn’t be any better - thank you sir

[@bobkoss280]

Thank you for making this. None of this was obvious from the docs.

[@kelley64]

It’s not obvious because it’s suckless. They believe if you have to ask you shouldn’t use it.

[@patrickprucha5522]

Thanks very much. There are many video's that are available. But from yours i got a couple of hints that were not available else where. I guess, when someone shows you how to do it at first, its easier to grasp, then looking at someones config.def.h or config.h file. Your step by step was very helpful. Thanks!

[@cjennings]

Great video . If I had a video like this when I started with DWM, it would have saved me handfuls of Advil. :)

[@linuxdabbler]

@Craig Jennings. Same here, but I learned a lot about what doesn't work and hope to save someone future headaches. :)

[@williamjohn1815]

Thanks very much might start using DWM with your awesome tips..

[@diskoteket9408]

This video is great! Stoked to try on a VM! Thanks alot! ❤️

[@Pi7on]

Very informative, just what I was looking for 👍🏻

[@al-du6lb]

Great video. Next time, you can use the package `terminus-font` and the command `setfont ter-v32n` to increase the size of the font in the tty.

[@marianorodrigocc]

This is a special video, great channel dude! from Argentina papa!!

[@plasmalife5532]

❤️❤️ thanks keep going 💝 You will became a big youtuber 😁 god bless you

[@KeithSalisbury]

Nice, made me want to try this!

[@pandenize]

Great video. Thanks!

[@mrmadiv]

i had a lot of error while installing and configuring it.Thanks for the tutorial.

[@MrNeilypops]

Thanks. Interesting video. It took me a long time to figure out patching and the config.h deletion if patches fail.

[@MoAlarawi]

Nice work.

[@systemtrader1]

Is the best dwm video on youtube !!!!!!

[@NixwayRU]

Thank you!

[@ridhowijaya7959]

wow thanks dude. i never know that patching can use "-p1" flag, i always do " patch < patch.diff " directly and always get error

[@peterjansen4826]

What is up with Linux-users and music? So many of us play an instrument. True story: many of the first programmers who got hired were musicians, mostly pianists. I myself play piano and guitar. I just started with a fresh dwm 6.2, I did an automated system-tray patch and 2 manual patches: rotate-stack and pertag. I highly recommend those patches, so far it went great. In the panel I display the date and used RAM (out of curiosity) with xsetroot. As Luke Smith said, dwm is so easy that a caveman can do it. Well, maybe not that but use it. :)

[@linuxdabbler]

@Peter Jansen. dwm is a fantastic window manager, one of my favorites.. I will have to try out those patches on a clean build (I keep a VM pretty much ready to go at all times. Lol). I have noticed the music thing too. I've never played professionally by any stretch of the imagination (a.k.a. I kinda suck at it) but I enjoy playing for my usual audience of none. It's a great stress reliever.

[@peterjansen4826]

​@@linuxdabbler I also only play for myself usually. I wouldn't mind performing and I definitely could do that for classical music but it hasn't happened yet. I haven't pimped my panel as much as you yet. Patching dwm is quite easy if you are not sloppy, I think that you can do most patches within 15 minutes, the system tray would take longer (30 minutes?). For me it takes a bit longer because I superficially read the code which I paste (I can program a bit in C). I open notepadqq on one half of the monitor to read the patch (the syntax highlighting helps a lot) and on the other half I open vim. The diff-output shows a few lines before and after where you have to make the edits. I recommend to do the system-tray patch automatically on a clean build, that works fine. It probably is the biggest one. Obviously it is best to backup after every patch if it works. The one drawback which I noticed of dwm is that some games do a bit difficult. For example if you play StarCraft2 without changing anything then you can not resume the game if you leave the tag and go back. That can be solved by playing the game windowed fullscreen. But the higher user-friendliness and the better performance of a good twm compared to a full DE is worth it for me.

[@developersdiary9513]

thank you

[@peterjansen4826]

I recommend to try out Alacritty. Download the configfile from DistroTube (Derek Taylor on GitLab). I myself enabled transparency and I use JetBrains.

[@linuxdabbler]

I've been thinking about trying alacritty.

[@freddieventura4382]

Thanks for this amazing info. Just one thing , I'm trying to use the icons from the fonts awesome cheatsheet , after installing the package `sudo apt-get install fonts-font-awesome` and it looks like some icons get loaded on vim other's not (broadly 30% of the icons from the cheatsheet get loaded). Is this the correct debian package or I am missing any other?

[@linuxdabbler]

Hi @Freddie Ventura. fonts-font-awesome is the correct package. which version of the font-awesome cheat sheet are you using? if you run apt show fonts-font-awesome, the version will be 5.(something), but it should specify that it is actually using 4.7. as long as you are copying fonts from the 4.7 font-awesome cheat-sheet, it should be ok. I haven't had any issues anyway. hope this helps.

[@freddieventura4382]

@@linuxdabbler fonts-font-awesome Version: 5.0.10+really4.7.0~dfsg-1 fontawesome.com/cheatsheet I copied all of the 3 types (solid , regular, brands)

[@linuxdabbler]

Here is the link to the cheatsheet I used. fontawesome.com/v4.7.0/cheatsheet/

[@freddieventura4382]

@@linuxdabbler Cheers Thanks a lot thisone works better, almost all the icons get rendered. Thanks for your fast response!

[@VulcanOnWheels]

I like what you do in this video, but initially, I could hardly see what you had on your screen. Also, I tried to include your volume slider, but I kept getting an error message; something with "execute-command".

[@Torvating]

26:20 if you guys are having problem with the copy and paste of the symbols. Try to download VSC and open the config.h with it... it does NOT support the emojis but you can just copy paste into it ... and it will show a white bar. I think its much better you doing it than trying to copy via terminal

[@darmoed_phantorm]

just change font in terminal

[@Torvating]

@@darmoed_phantorm it’s another way to do it … but new Linux users would probably have some troubles with it 😅 (like me 1 year ago :3)

[@linuxdabbler]

Geany also works well for this.

[@blackie5566]

Very helpful, thank you so much!!! I'm running DWM on Debian Sid - I have installed it with apt-get install dwm. The strange thing is, that I can't find a config - file. Do you have any idea? Many thanks for your help!

[@linuxdabbler]

Installing it with apt will not pull in the source code. You will need to pull it in separately with apt-src wiki.debian.org/apt-src This should help with the specifics.

[@blackie5566]

@@linuxdabbler Thank you for the hint!!!

[@JacobKapitein]

Thanks for the video! It's working great on my system, except all the fonts are really, really wide. Like, the letters are okay, but there is just a big space on the right side before the next letter starts. On dwm it's fixed, but it's still happening on st and I can't find a fix for it

[@JacobKapitein]

(running arch btw) I fixed it by installing Noto Fonts. Then changing the config.h file and settings the font to NotoSansMono-Regular. After that I ran `make install` and it was fixed.

[@linuxdabbler]

@Jacob Kapitein. I had a similar issue in st and urxvt a while back. I installed the Ubuntu fonts and updated the font cache, then ran xrdb-merge and urxvt was fixed... I had a typo in the font in config.def.h so I fixed the error, deleted config.h and ran make. In Debian, I just symlink the compiled package to either ~/bin or /usr/local/bin instead of running make install.

[@drumpf4all]

Good video. However, you didn't mention if you like DWM? Or if you prefer it over spectre.

[@linuxdabbler]

I have been using dwm exclusively for about a month...Spectrwm and dwm are very different. I prefer the ease of spectrwm's config file, but I like the bar better in dwm. I could comfortably live in either. But, everybody will have a different opinion. Which is the great thing about having all this choice.

[@ChaiBronz]

@@linuxdabbler could you so a short video talking about the two and their differences? Spectre was inspired by dwm (and xmonad) so would be interested in your thoughts on the things that set them apart. I've never played with dwm myself but find spectre to be very endearing in its simplicity.

[@soulofhogwarts]

Can you show how can we add clickable icon in left top corner of dwmbar? Which can be latter use as xmenu or any rofi launcher or something.

[@linuxdabbler]

There are a couple of patches that can do something similar. The button patch will give you the ability to add a clickable button in the far left corner. The launchers patch will give you the ability to add multiple clickable buttons but they are located to the right of the tags. The buttons are configured above the keybindings and in the mouse bindings in config.h with either patch.

[@philippeheyvaert3742]

Nice video Mike. I've got a little problem though... I use an azerty keyboard. I've applied the azerty patch but I can't get my 6th tag and 8th tag to work. The characters on those keys are : key 6 equals § - key 8 equals ! I've been searching several days now what the word 'names' of those two are but I can't seem to find anything. Suckless should include some more info on the patches I think. Do you have any idea how those keys can work? Best wishes Philippe

[@linuxdabbler]

@Philippe Heyvaert. I can't really speak from experience with azerty keyboards. But you could use the keycodes patch to to use key codes instead of keysym in your config.h file. I have always had good luck with the xev command when I need to print key codes. This should work independently of the keyboard layout. Hope this helps.

[@philippeheyvaert3742]

@@linuxdabbler I've got it working, but not with the keycodes patch. I've was using the wrong names for those keys. Your xev command tip helped me a lot. Figured it out after a couple of minutes. Thanks a lot Mike!

[@BadAssBlackOverlord]

I use Trisquel 7.0. Will these steps followed exactly help me get this sorted from a very noob fresh start? Or are there other things to consider outside this video? I don't want to have to follow all these steps and get stuck while knee deep.

[@linuxdabbler]

@BadAssBlackOverlord. (Awesome name BTW) I haven't tried this on trisquel. Some of the packages may have different names, but it should work just fine. I was able to do this without adding the contrib and non-free repos, so it should work with a fsf approved distro.

[@linuxdabbler]

If font-awesome is not available, you should be able to install a nerd font and achieve similar results.

[@BadAssBlackOverlord]

@@linuxdabbler Thank you for the fast response. Your channel is very palatable compared to the 1000s I've seen here on KZbin. If I run into any issues I will shoot you a message.

[@VidarrKerr]

Are you going to switch over to dwl? Excellent Video! Thank You!

[@linuxdabbler]

Sadly, I haven't tried wayland at all... But once I do, I am definitely planning on trying dwl.

[@VidarrKerr]

@@linuxdabbler I have Debian 11 running now, with Plasma 5.20.2 and the latest Gnome. I can't decide which one sucks less. X is going to die out soon, so I want to be prepared for that. This Gnome on Wayland is really good, better than Plasma. But, a lot of features I need and use don't exist in Gnome --Krunner and window transparencies most of all. Also, Gnome removed the maximize and minimize buttons from the windows and are planning to merge all their products, so they look and act the same way on phones, tablets and PCs. This is a huge mistake. I don't want my PC and laptop to look and act like my phone. I am also Very Against dumbing down products to satisfy the lowest common denominator, which is what Ubuntu/Gnome is doing. It will be up to another distro to create a better competitor for running on Wayland. As it is now, ugh..... KDE/Plasma is over if they don't evolve with Wayland.

[@GbengaOguntuase]

Does anyone know the shortcut for increasing the text size like that?

[@linuxdabbler]

@Gbenga Oguntuase. I set my build of st to scale the fonts with Control+Shift+k for up and Control+Shift+j for down. Check the config.h file in my st build for the syntax if you'd like. github.com/linuxdabbler/suckless

[@BengtFrost]

UNIX (and suckless style): 1. Do one thing and do it well 2. Keep It Simple Stupid (KISS) 3. Use C 4. Use tools (grep, sed, awk, echo, > < >>

[@sikorsp22]

4:39 you can install "xdg-user-dirs" package instead of making directories manually

[@linuxdabbler]

I forgot about that in this video. But I have created the files with xdg-user-dirs-update then.

[@byranotieno]

Why not use "xdg-user-dirs-update" to generate the default home directories 4:54

[@linuxdabbler]

@Byran Otieno. That is definitely an option. I just didn't think about it when I was recording. It would have made a good addition to the video though. But in my case, I don't generally use the Desktop, Templates, or Public directories, so I didn't include them when I created the directories manually.

[@MrRenanwill]

Good command tho. =)

[@hieuthai8244]

Tôi có thể làm như vậy trên Arch linux không?

[@thelostrider1]

@linux dabbler What would happen if I didn't symlink to /bin/dwm? It would not work? And, your $home/bin isn't normally in the $path right?

[@linuxdabbler]

I always symlink the path to dwm to somewhere in the default path so I don't have to move it every time a run the make command. /home/$USER/bin should be in the $PATH... May need to check /home/$USER/.profile. In my case, if /home/$USER/bin exists, it gets put in the $PATH. But you may need to reboot for it to take effect. If all else fails, you can always export whatever directory you want to the $PATH in your shell's config file. (.bashrc .zshrc or config.fish)

[@thelostrider1]

@@linuxdabbler Thanks for the answer, I'm fairly new to Linux (as you may have noticed). Just installed my first distro last week (minimal Debian, followed your tutorial video). Tho, a year ago I didn't even know html, now I'm on linux, think I'm moving fairly fast. It makes sense, may I assume you do the same with st (or other suckless software), symlink? Btw, one think I quite don't understand is I see many people with scripts (like scripts for dwm) that are exec by bash (#! /bin/bash) but they use Zsh shell. How can that work, bash scripts with zsh shell? Do you have any video about those topics?

[@linuxdabbler]

@@thelostrider1 I think I can explain the zsh/bash question. There is more than one shell installed on the system. Zsh can run bash scripts because bash is the shell that's actually running the script... Zsh was used to simply call up the script. At the top of every script, there is a shebang (#!) Then the shell that executes the command is called, /bin/bash and /bin/sh are the two most common. Both bash and zsh are posix compliant shells. I ran the fish shell (which is not posix compliant) in a previous video and ran bash scripts from there with no issue because bash was called at the top of the script.

[@linuxdabbler]

@@thelostrider1 to answer your at question... Yes. I always symlink the compiled binary to somewhere in the path... /usr/local/bin/ seems to be a popular place to put them.

[@thelostrider1]

@@linuxdabbler Ohhh, think I understand now. It was messing with my head that you could use zsh and run bash script since bash sintax is different. But that doens't matter since what zsh is doing is calling the script and since we declared the script to be run on bash, it will run on bash in the background. Thanks! Idk how you don't have more subs, actually good content and tutorials from scratch like the debian minimal installer. Keep with the good content :P

[@marcovirtual]

What does the p1 argument does in the patch command?

[@linuxdabbler]

@Marco Vasconcelos. The patch arguments really have more to do with the type of program you are patching as well as how the diff files are generated. The p1 argument is for patching a multi-file project like DWM. If it was only 1 file, you could use p0 or no argument at all... Depending on the use case.

[@marcovirtual]

@@linuxdabbler thanks for your reply! BTW, subscribed to your channel!

[@linuxdabbler]

@@marcovirtual no worries. I appreciate it. and glad I could help.

[@jeanrodrigues6249]

DWM

[@engageintellect]

Why symlink DWM and ST when you can just “sudo make install” ???

[@linuxdabbler]

@jc9361. That is generally the "Debian way" of doing things. It would probably be fine in this case though. It is taking a page from the "don't break Debian guide" I could edit the makefile to do it for me, then running sudo make install and it would work exactly the same. I've just gotten used to doing it this way.

[@engageintellect]

@@linuxdabbler thanks for your reply, very interesting. I’ve always used arch so I know nothing about Debian. - Why I have your attention, do you know how to change floating window sizes in spectrwm? I switched over to it from bspwm after seeing your videos on it... so far I love it but can figure out how to set sizes for floating windows (chromium, pcmanfm, etc) In the man page it mentions using wmctrl... but that only moves/resizes windows AFTER they have been open. Surely there is a simpler way to do this?

[@linuxdabbler]

I usually just resize it after opening, but I believe there is a setting somewhere for pcmanfm or thunar where you can set "geometry". Let me get back to you on that one.

[@hieuthai8244]

can i do that on arch linux

[@linuxdabbler]

Yes! this can be done very easily on Arch Linux. most of your DWM "rice" images on r/unixporn use Arch as a base.

[@ParkerOnLinux]

Instead of deleting config.h every time you edit the def.h file you can just edit the def.h then run cp config.def.h config.h then run sudo make clean install and there ya go that’s how I do mine

[@linuxdabbler]

@Travis Parker. That is definitely an option. I have just gotten used to deleting the file because when I was practicing these before the video and taking notes, I was just letting the make command regenerate the file. I rarely... If ever... Run make install... I'm usually in Debian and they generally recommend symlinking the compiled program to the user's path.

[@jimmcg229]

@@linuxdabbler change the install target in the makefile to use symlinks, and running make install will do just that.

[@sudodoas]

I usually just edit the config.h. Am I doing something wrong?

[@linuxdabbler]

@sudo doas. I started editing the config.def.h and deleting the config.h file before running "make" out of habit... I once had to delete my config.h to make a patch work and lost most of my keybindings. That's why... I could have copied config.def.h to config.h or used cat > to over write it, but it became a habit because config.h is automatically generated if it doesn't exist.

[@BlueTac1992]

> wants a keybinding to change wallpaper > types `clear` instead of using Ctrl+L

[@linuxdabbler]

@Jonny Brown. I use Ctrl+L a lot, but not when recording. I type "clear" in videos to give the viewer a visual indicator of what is happening in the terminal instead of all the text just disappearing.

[@christopherdavies7403]

Can someone for the life of me possibly help with getting the firefox hotkey working i'm about to nuke this vm and start from scratch

[@linuxdabbler]

@Christopher Davies. I usually declare it as a variable above the keybindings like this. static const char *webbrowser[] = { "firefox-esr", NULL }; Then call the variable in the keybindings like this. { MODKEY, XK_w, spawn, {.v = webbrowser } }, Hope this helps.

[@christopherdavies7403]

@@linuxdabbler alright so I was trying to get it to work and I followed what you had line for line except set the hotkey to static const char *firefoxcmd[] = { "firefox-esr", NULL } { MODKEY|ShitMask, XK_i, spawn, { .v = firefoxcmd } } the variable declaration right under the termcmd declaration and the hotkey assign under the termcmd assign. It's a brand new I wrote this all in the config.def.h Other than this it's a brand new .def.h I have deleted the .h file before running make and I have been googling for hours until I saw you do it right in front of me and it still doesn't work :'(

[@linuxdabbler]

@Christopher Davies. I tried a few things once I saw your reply... like launching firefox-esr from terminal, dmenu, and binding a key to it... and it looks like your syntax is right. and I typed your keybinding into my config.def.h but added a ";" to the end of the declaration line and a "," to the end of the binding line. everything compiles properly, then logged out and logged in and it worked for me...the only thing I can think is there might be a conflicting keybinding, or dwm is somehow static const char *firefoxcmd[] = { "firefox-esr", NULL}; { MODKEY|ShiftMask, XK_i, spawn, {.v = firefoxcmd } }, This was copied directly from my config.def.h file after testing it. If you'd like to try it...

[@christopherdavies7403]

@@linuxdabbler I left out the comma and semicolon on accident because I was just quickly typing while frustrated in my reply to you. I'll try deleting the config and recompiling again but if that doesn't work imma just nuke it and retry from scratch. I must of fucked something up somewhere else

[@linuxdabbler]

@Christopher Davies... Been there. Lol... Good luck to you.