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 Work

See the TODO file in the root of the repo for next steps and ongoing work. I'm trying to keep it mostly up to date but the docs/TODOs and the codebase may diverge at points when I forget to update things. If in doubt, read the source.