Penrose - a tiling window manager in the style of dwm / xmonad

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.

Current project status

If you don't mind a bare bones (really bare bones) window manager then you can take penrose for a spin using the config in the example directory. You will need to update the keybindings to launch your preferred terminal emulator and program launcher and may want to adjust the floating window classes to handle some additional programs.

Current functionality

• user defined layout functions (side_stack implemented)
• configurable window borders for focused / unfocused
• configurable gaps
• configurable keybindings
• workspaces (including moving clients between workspaces)
• kill focused client
• cycle focus

Project 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.

• 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.

Current TODO list

• drag clients through stack

• track focused monitor with multi-monitor setup

• move client to monitor

• single client fullscreen for all layouts (configurable)

• Run several / hooks for keybindings

  • It'd be nice if it were possible to just give a block of actions to be run but I'm not sure how that will work with the gen_keybindings macro

• 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