DWM is a tiling window manager for Linux. One of the main charachteristics is, that in order to do any customization and expansion, you have to do it in the source code itself. The base is very minimal, and if you want to a feature, you go the the main website, download a file, patch it in… and hope you get no error messages. :)

DWM is part of suckless utilities, a group of software that aims to minimal at core, but expandable by anyone, who is interested.

Personally I am using version 6.1, because I couldn't compile it for some reason. Many of the stuff on the website is applicable to older version, so I have a nice build now, currently using these patches:

• alpha - for transparent bar, you of course need a compositor for that, like compton, or picom
• shiftview - you can switch to previous or next tag with this, and you can set your own keybindings of course
• pertags - every tag has it's own configuration, even when you change it on others.
• fullgaps - create gaps between windows, which makes them more distinct, I highly recommend changing border size too.

Install DWM No matter how you acquire DWM - from the website archive for older source, or just cloning the git repo - you need only two command:

$ make

and

# make install

But I just usually make clean install as root.

Of course if you got some errors, you have to manual interviene. I learned some stuff, from this video:

After install you have to make sure, you can start it either from a display manager or from the terminal via xinitrc. Since I switched to Slackware, I don't use a display manager so I just added this line at the end of of my ~.xinitrc:

exec dwm

I also use this .xinitrc file to launch stuff that needs to be launched. Like my keyboard language, or chaning Caps Lock to Ctrl.