 Hey everybody, welcome back to the channel. Today we're gonna talk a little bit about DWM. Now if you watch some of my previous videos you'll know that I've come to highly enjoy DWM. I used to be a big i3 guy. Now I've pretty much moved to DWM full-time and I'm sure that eventually something else will catch my fancy and I'll move on to a different window manager. I'm just kind of like that. My attention span is not that big. But one of the things you'll learn about DWM if you decide you're going to use it for very often is that the way it comes out of the box so to speak is pretty much unusable. I mean there's so many things that it just it can do. So many annoyances that you have to deal with without you know actually putting in some work. So the way DWM and the suckless people solve this is through the patching system. Now I'm not going to do a video on how to patch. There's there are dozens of those out there. So just Google how to patch DWM. It's pretty easy. It was very daunting for me the first time because I didn't know what the hell I was doing. But I think that's the way it is for everybody. Just Google that or YouTube that and you'll be able to find out you know a pretty good tutorial. I know hex DSL has done a good one. Mental Outlaw has done a good one. So just check out those channels. So what I'm going to do today though is talk about a few of my favorite patches. Now I've listed this as my top five DWM patches but I probably will talk about a few more than five but just roundabouts. So let's let's jump over to a browser shall we let's see here. I really need to get that changing of a scene to a key binding. I'm sure there is one. So the first one I'm going to talk about one is called always center. Now this is it's a weird one like because it's not really something that you think about. So when you spawn a window that is floating so let's just say a scratch pad like this if you didn't have this patch it would appear up here in the upper left hand corner. That's annoying AF so this is especially something to do like steam. If you use steam on DWM a lot of times it'll have like a pop up for like a sale or something like that that's considered a pop up sometimes or maybe it's a login or the the update dialogue thing that will actually spawn on the upper left hand corner if you don't have always center patched in. So it's very simple. It's only a couple lines. I think it's a yeah it's only like two lines of code. These are the two lines of code that it adds adds to DWM.C that's I mean it's very simple code very easy to install very unlikely to fail if you patch even if you've patched many times before so that is always centers one of the ones that I have used the three or four times now I've installed DWM. The next one is attached bottom this one will all right so by default I can't show you this because I have this patch installed by default any new windows you spawn are spawned over here and this one on this side on the left hand side that's annoying so if you keep you keep spawning and your oldest window would be down here at the bottom that's not the way things should work and I think that that I mean but oops oh man you got to be careful what you close we're gonna have to reopen those so anyways that's not the way it should work so I'm gonna have to go get my list of patches again so the the next one I want to talk about is auto start this is very uh self I mean it's right in the name it's auto start without this patch DWM can't auto start anything it doesn't have an auto start file you'd have to run all of your auto start programs or whatever like nitrogen or sx hkd or um you know poly bar if you're using a different you know any bar any bar patch any of those things you'd have to run that through excellent rc or something similar like that with the auto start patch it allows you to create a auto start script that will start all those things like comp then or py com as it is known not known now stuff every time you start DWM this is again it's something that is built into every other uh window manager that I know of even x-monad which is considered just as suckless as DWM has that built in all right so the next one cycle layouts isn't one that you really need unless you have a whole bunch of layouts that you have installed and I do for some really stupid reasons so I'm just gonna ignore that uh move stack is another one so let's say you have a couple windows and uh let's open up h top on this let's say I want to move this up in the stack so I'd have to by default you can't do that there's no mechanism for moving windows on the screen at all uh well that's not true you can make them uh you can change the width of the master and stack cloud that's it you can't move want them up or down so if you but with this patch you can move it with a key binding to different places and that's how you do it um so let me close these um that's that's the move stack patch um so I've covered now one two three four so there's a couple more like I said I was going to cover more than five anyways I don't know why I called this a top five video um right so per tag is another thing that is solves a problem that dwm for some reason creates on its own every other window manager out there the windows the workspaces act as workspaces and each one can have its own separate layout of windows by default on dwm if say you have multiple windows and they're laid out like this okay if you change to a different tag let's you know tag for you open up you know windows and they'd automatically be in the exact same layout um you and you can't change if you change it on four it would automatically change on three change on three it automatically change on four so if you say you you made you made it look like this you'd go you'd change it to your tag three and this would be changed just like you change it on tag four I don't think I really explain all that well but what per tag does is allows each tag to have independent layouts so sizing of windows can be independent per tag and so on it's another thing that dwm really should do out of the box because why would you want all of your windows on every tag to have the exact same size that takes away flexibility I mean it's really I don't think let's see dwm per tag this adds quite a few lines actually a lot more than I actually thought it did yeah this adds quite a few tag they claim to be suckless but really this this this um that tag shouldn't be so long anyways so another one I'm going to talk about is one that is not necessary for everybody but I mean I think it is necessary for everybody but it's not necessary for use of dwm like all the rest of tomorrow I covered this in a video not too long ago I will link to it in the description below and probably up in the one of the corners here um this the scratch pads thing this is a scratch pad and this is just my my music player and you can have any like terminal application you know in there and it's awesome it's changed the way I use Linux it's really I mean it's just cool um it's basically a workspace or a terminal that exists on a workspace that is invisible so you don't have to have you know that program taking up space on a workspace or a tag all right um really the last one there's two more one status almanz is really simple it just if you have multiple monitors uh it means that your status bar will show up on all of your monitors again something that you probably should have out of the box um although I can see that I can see that one at least because not everybody has multiple monitors so at least that kind of makes sense uh same thing with warp warp is another one that is best suited for if you have multiple monitors um but it also is good if you have multiple uh you know if you have multiple windows open basically what warp does is when you change the focus of a monitor so I'm on my other one you'll notice that the cursor left my cursor is now on the other monitor in the center that way if I change the focus you know to another monitor I don't have to hunt for the the cursor which is on another screen it automatically comes back see how it comes back comes back that's what warp does very simple again I think that's just a couple lines of code so those are my my favorite patches I will say this let's uh go back to the big screen here and I'm gonna I'll probably make a video on this later on after I've played around with ST a little bit more but my opinion is that suckless software is pretty much useless without patches there are certain patches that you just have to have in order to make suckless software specifically DWM in this case uh worthwhile or uh you know pleasant to use and that's and it's kind of like having a car where yet technically you could drive it but it comes with stools instead of seats in the you know and it has you know the the steering wheel's like kind of square you know so it's it's just kind of weird and you have to kind of go through and add extras to it in order to make it actually pleasant to use so uh the other end of this is that you really do have to be careful with how you patch DWM because the more patches you have the more likely things are going to break so I'm right now at the point where I think I'm probably at the max number of patches that you should have I have uh let's see that's uh four five six seven eight nine ten I have 11 patches um and you'll especially want to make sure that you don't switch between things so this is actually my second build a DWM on this computer I started out with DWM blocks which is the stuff that provides the stuff for the status bar and that worked out fine but then I switched to SL status and because I didn't go through and un take out all the code that DWM blocks added to DWM my SL status actually ended up failing after I added a couple patches so you really have to kind of be careful of your patching history and know what's been added what hasn't been added and when you take something out you have to make sure you get everything of that patch out of your code um so it could get pretty complicated the more patches you have the best thing to do is just to add the ones that you absolutely have to have the ones that you know will work all right so that is it for this video uh I know it was kind of a rambly ranty kind of you all my videos are like that uh I don't make notes because completely too lazy to do so I actually did have all the browser tabs open but I closed them because I'm a dumb person if you want to support this this dumb person you can do so by subscribing or hitting the like button or you want to do us a favor and do both we really do appreciate that thank you for watching we'll see you next time