Penrose - a tiling window manager in the style of dwm

Not ready yet for general use but aiming for a configure in source and recompile model similar to dwm / Xmonad / Qtile. The code should be well documented and relatively easy to understand (if not, please let me know!): I'm learning the XCB API as I go so there are likely multiple places where things are not being done in the smartest way.

Non-goals

• A config file

  • Parsing a config file and dynamically switching behaviour on the contents adds a huge amount of complexity to the code. I'd much rather keep the code simple and well documented so that modifying it is easy and then just recompile. This is also more in the spirit of dwm (some top level config for quick changes but really you should dig into the source) than Xmonad/Qtile (a library that you use to write your on WM) but I suspect the latter aproach should be possible.

• IPC / relying on external programs

  • I love acme from plan9 and how easy it is to drive it's state from external programs (check out my acme-corp tools to see what I mean) but that comes at the expense of the internal logic becoming massively more complicated. As few moving parts as possible is ideal. So, things that are easy to acomplish using the XCB api (key bindings, simple rendering of a bar etc) are in, full on IPC via an exposed API is out.

• Programatic hooks

  • Rather than expose a set of hooks to be triggered, it is encouraged that you simply modify the WindowManager method directly. Want to trigger something every time you switch to a new workspace? Add a custom function call to the switch_workspace method. Done.

Current TODO list

• Focus

  • Need to track the focused client (on focused monitor only) both for adding a visual indicator but also so that the client can be manipulated by other actions from the WindowManager.

• Handling client removal

  • Should(?) just be a case of firing off the correct xcb messages to trigger this and then exposing that as an action. (Relies on being able to track the currently focused client though!)

• Workspaces

  • I've started writing penrose with the idea that I would use a tag based system similar to dwm as that is what I am currently using. Now that I think about it some more, I much prefer the set up I used to have with Qtile where I added in the ability to "throw" workspaces from one monitor to another and modify layout settings per workspace.
  • With that in mind, there would be a single client list, with each workspace tracking a list of known clients. Monitors would then have an active workspace and user bindings would trigger modifications to those mappings rather than modifying the client structs themselves.

• dwm style bar and systray

  • This one is probably a decent amount of work...I still prefer it to having to install and configure something like lemonbar/polybar though and exposing the API via xsetroot is a nice touch that I'd like to keep.
  • While the Qtile bar I used to have was my favourite by far, I doubt I'm going to be able to reproduce that any time soon starting from scratch!

• Scratchpads

  • My dwm set up currently has a single scratchpad (a terminal) but I've previously has a set up where different bindings triggered scratchpads for different programs. Not decided yet on whether I prefer that (hard coded scratch pads) or the ability to tag windows as being on a scratch pad and then cycling through them a-la i3.

• Mouse bindings

  • I'm currently grabbing MOD-{1, 3} on start up with the intension of using that for mouse based move and resize respectively. The xcb events provide cursor position info so it should be a case of generating a target region from that and applying the resize.
  • Probably should factor out the resize logic so this can be reused then...
  • getting draw-term back (possibly as a build in feature) would be pretty cool