bspwm (4056B)
1 BSPWM probably biased review 2 3 TODO: Proofread 4 5 I have used this wm for a long time, but there wasn't any particular reason for 6 doing so apart from hearing about people using it online. 7 8 Binary size (If you care) 9 10 BSPWM is small when compared to for example i3. On the arch linux repos it is 11 0.26 MiB, and SXHKD (The recommended keyboard daemon) is 0.14 MiB. 12 13 What is it? 14 15 BSPWM is a window manager that tiles and partitions windows as leaves of a 16 binary tree. It is a dynamic window manager (you can make floating windows) and 17 is managed with a socket client program, which makes interacting with the window 18 manager in shell scripts easy (although EWMH exists and is meant to do the same 19 thing). BSPWM has partial EWMH support. 20 21 Default config 22 23 There is no default configuration, though I think people usually copy the 24 example config's bspwmrc and sxhkdrc. There are gaps by default which im sure 25 would make a lot of people happy (for some reason ?? reddit posts!). It is setup 26 so that there are 10 tags for all monitors, not 10 tags for each monitor (This 27 is customizable). Some programs are given default desktops and states which may 28 confuse new users if they have not read over the config (Which they should have 29 done). Some of the default SXHKD bindings are similar to i3's which may be good 30 as I would imagine a lot of BSPWM users come from using i3. 31 32 Configuration documentation 33 34 The man page for bspc (the socket client) did not list the commands at the top 35 which is a little annoying. When you want to look for configuration options you 36 want to search "SETTINGS". I have actually never used this dispite using BSPWM 37 maybe for over a year now. 38 39 One thing that I have found annoying with this wm is trying to move windows in a 40 certain way which i will discribe with an ascii picture 41 42 Starting with: 43 44 ,____________, ,____________, 45 |a | |b | 46 | | | | 47 | | |____________| 48 | | ,____________, 49 | | |c | 50 | | | | 51 |____________| |____________| 52 53 I want to move c so that it looks like this: 54 55 ,____________, ,____________, 56 |a | |b | 57 | | | | 58 |____________| | | 59 ,____________, | | 60 |c | | | 61 | | | | 62 |____________| |____________| 63 64 If i was to move c to the left it would look like this: 65 66 ,____________, ,____________, 67 |c | |b | 68 | | | | 69 | | |____________| 70 | | ,____________, 71 | | |a | 72 | | | | 73 |____________| |____________| 74 75 This is probably something you cannot avoid due to the nature of the binary tree 76 partitioning, but maybe you can I wouldn't know. I wasn't able to figure it out 77 by looking at the settings section of the manual though. 78 79 Potential capabilities with the wm 80 81 I don't think there is anything that you can't do in this window manager in 82 terms of managing windows, though I can imagine that it may be a lot easier to 83 do some things in other window managers. That doesn't mean there are things that 84 this window manager can't do well, because there certainly are things that it 85 can do well (binary space partitioning! i.e. the name of the window manager) 86 87 Overall thoughts 88 89 BSPWM is definitely a usable window manager (I used it for a while and lots of 90 people online use it as well) although I feel like it should be pointed out that 91 this window manager is specifically called binary space partitioning window 92 manager. I think a lot of people choose this window manager simply because they 93 see lots of online posts with people using the window manager without actually 94 understanding that it is a BSP wm. I am absolutely absolutely sure that there 95 are people who want a binary space partitioning window manager (I would imagine 96 the creater of the wm would have wanted one, else why would they have made it in 97 the first place?), it's just that not everyone would enjoy binary tree tiling. 98 Know what you are running before you run it!