 Hey everybody, welcome back to the channel today. I'm going to be hopping window managers. So I've been using DWM for about oh probably close to six months. I Think I started using DWM right about the time. I actually started you this YouTube channel And I'm ready for something new so a couple weeks ago a few of the other YouTube Linux youtubers went through and talked about a window manager called left WM I'm gonna try that out someday so I added it to my bookmarks to look at later and today That's what I'm going to do is look at left WM and see if I can get used to it enough To the point where I can make it my daily driver now I've been playing around with it now for a couple hours So I've made some changes and I'll talk about the things that I've done And I also give some earlier thoughts on it and then maybe in a couple weeks or a month or so I'll make another video on My experience with it and we'll see if I'm still you know sticking with it. So let's go ahead and jump in shall we All right, so left WM is on github here, and I just installed it via the AUR now You could go through and build this through the rust package manager Installer or whatever it is called cargo, but I went just went through and installed via that the AUR using EA and I've experienced some interesting things that aren't on the dock in the documentation So and I'll talk about those later, but for the most part it just installed it added it to the X sessions file Just fine. So it's in SDDM, which is like the display man or the login manager that I use So it booted right in and the first thing you'll know when you boot into it is you just get a black screen So it's very much like Xmonad in that way. I think it's like cutile in that way It doesn't have a bar or anything like that So you might be lost if you just install it and you know not know what you're doing So the default key bindings are super shift enter for a terminal Which you'll have to have a Lackardy install Otherwise it won't launch anything because left WM is written in rust and it promotes other rust programs So things like a Lackardy are set to default So I have a Lackardy installed and I'm actually trying Lackardy as my daily driver So if you hit super shift enter, you'll get a terminal and it's a Lackardy Now I've gone through and changed the key binding to that to super enter because I Don't really need feel the need to have three key presses to get to a terminal when I do it all the time It's just super enter. That's the way. I've also changed the close command now by default Super shift Q will close a window. I've changed that to super super Q By default super shift X closes Left WM. I've left that the same The only other one that I'm going to end up changing is D menu right now Super P brings up D menu and I've left that the same and I probably will keep that actually But I'm going to add one call for super D so that I can use Rofi now the documentation is actually Fairly good now like I said I experienced some weird issues with theming That I don't think that other people will face for whatever reason Left WM won't read the auto start file appropriately or won't it won't read the script for the theme appropriately I had to add it to the auto start file in dot config So I said I'll talk about that a little bit later for the most part the documentation is actually really what well done It does there is a full Wiki up here that you can click on and I will take you through all the things and commands that you can put into the configuration file with keybind commands and the workspaces and such To control them via whatever in the in the configuration file So actually let's go ahead and take a look at the configuration file. I think I have this on three Yeah, now I'll have to zoom in here Yeah, so control plus in alacrity is Zoom in which is something that is actually pretty good because control shift plus is usually the one that I use it's close enough now Really When you after you've installed that you're left with a dot config Slash left WM folder and that contains just a config dot toml file These are the ones are things that I've actually gone through and added So I'll talk about those things in a just a minute But the config dot toml file is really just your configuration for your keybinding So if we just vim into config dot toml, we'll all we'll see here is the declaration of the marquee the Work the names for the workspaces, which is just one through nine now the workspaces are Fairly interesting in that they're a little bit different than what you might be used to now like with DWM you have nine workspaces on monitor one nine workspaces on monitor two if you have a third monitor you have nine workspaces there in I Three you have a set number of workspaces, but you can have as many as you want But and you can assign those to different monitors now in BS PWM and Q tile and maybe X monad I'm not sure I haven't played around with X monad enough, but with X with with those Window managers you have nine workspaces total and where they are on your monitors depends on what Window has your focus so right now I'm on three if I were to change to six, which is my audacity and OBS Workspace it would actually change monitors Instead of just changing to that workspace because there's only one workspace number six it'll always assume that you want the mid the Workspace that you just press you know you use the key binding for as the main Workspace on your main monitor. So if I change to workspace one now Because so when I did that last key binding workspace six moved to monitor one workspace three moved to monitor two so my my Configure that tomo files actually over on monitor three, which you can't see right now But if I moved back to say like workspace, I don't know for That moves goes makes works plate. We're excuse me That makes workspace for them on the main screen, but leaves the second monitor as workspace three So it's a little Complicated and it takes a little bit getting used to now unlike q-tile, which is fairly easy to so it's in q-tile and Bspwm for that matter you can go through and move a window from one monitor to the other. There's a command Move to the other monitor and whatever it's called. I Don't see that with left wmi. There's a whole bunch of Key bind commands here that you can use You have the execute hard reload soft reload Close window move to last workspace move up move down move top move to tag move window up move windows down Next layout previous layout workspace next focus previous. I wonder if this might actually work. So if I want mod All right, what if I wanted to shift to the next workspace? Move move move So what I want it to do is move Yeah, I don't see that maybe it's up here a little bit So that's focus And these are all focused move to tag Move to move to last workspace See I don't see one that says move to next workspace or move to other workspace So there's a focus next workspace. Yeah, this one here. So That's a little bit different and something that is been a little weird really what I'm gonna end up having to do is go through and Kind of learn the muscle memory of saying say I want to move this browser window to workspace All right, so let's say I want I have workspace eight of active on my second monitor If I wanted to move this to workspace a I couldn't do like super shift arrow keys or super shift left Which is something that could do in DWM or i3 or any of those other ones that I'd have to go super shift eight So if I do super shift left it actually does nothing if I do super shift L It also does nothing But if I do super shift eight that moves it eight and like I could change to the eight workspace here on my main screen You now you can see up here. I'm on eight. So that's a little weird and something that I'm gonna have to learn now The rest of the Configuration file is just the basic keybinding. So it does it does mod return for Lackardy it does my queue for closed window soft reload as my shift are keybinding this kills left WM and then See here if you have S lock installed it has a S lock binding here and then he moved to last workspace is mod shift W So I wonder What my shift W actually does my shift W moves it to so much FW will actually move it to the other monitor So that's the that's the thing. I was looking for well It will kind of move it to the other monitor sometimes like if I shift my shift W now it actually does nothing That's really weird. I'm not exactly sure what that is for. Let's actually go see if That moved to me move to last workspace Let me look at that again. Let's see what that actually says about that I'm past it move to last works tastes the window that is currently focused and moves it to the workspace that was active before the current workspace Okay, I'm not sure why that would be useful I'm not sure they have something where I can move to a different monitor and maybe they have that and I just don't see it That's always possible So the rest of these are fairly just used for moving things back and forth and moving to different tags now They don't use the Vemkeys which is really bothering me because I'm so used to using shift HJKL or Mods HJKL, so I'm gonna have to go through and change those They use the arrow keys and a lot of keyboards actually that I have and use don't actually have the arrow keys Now the one that I'm using today does but some of them the 60% keyboards that I have just don't have arrow keys And I don't want to use a different layer or whatever So that it's gonna have to change now like I said the Rest of this configuration files is just the keybinding So we won't even need to go through all the rest of these because you can actually take a look at them Let's talk a minute about themes and this is where I'm going to be talking a little about the problems that I was Having this morning when I first installed this so by default you can go through and install several themes now If you don't install the community themes, you're you're you're giving three Themes by default and you have to download these explicitly And if especially if you download them from the if you download left WM, but from the a you are you'll have to go to this GitHub page and download Left WM and then get the themes folder out of there and transfer it to your left WM config folder But you're given three themes by default you're giving lemon bar poly bar and XMO bar now I don't have XMO bar installed and I didn't care for lemon bar because I was too stupid to figure it out So I chose poly bar because I understand poly bar, and I've used poly for bar many times before now when you download these You're giving you need to create a Themes folder within your dot config slash left WM folder So I'm going to CD into the themes folder here and just do analysis now I've removed the lemon bar and the the XMO bar ones because I don't need those so I just kept them the basic poly bar and then what you need to do is do create a link between the Basic poly bar and the current folder now I don't know if it creates the current folder by default. You may have to create that I don't remember if I did or not, but you just do an LN dash s and then you can do this Command here, and then what's that supposed to do is when you hit reef You know re when you reload Left WM it's supposed to start up the steam as you see it here You get the poly bar and you get some you know a different colored border because by default the border color is red And you don't have a wallpaper with this thing you get a wallpaper You get colored borders and you get the poly bar, but it didn't work for me I didn't know why it was wasn't working for me Supposedly like I said when you hit reload or when you log out and log back in it's supposed to start that up But it doesn't now the way this works Is if we CD into the current folder and we do an LS here now each of these full themes have an up and a down script so What I found was that for whatever reason that up script was not going through and being executed at startup And I don't know why now. I'm sure it was something that I did wrong, but I couldn't get it to just work I thought it and I thought it would But it didn't so I ended up having to go through and execute it via an auto start file So but by default left WM will start up everything that's in your auto start file So let me show you that so if you CD into dot-config auto start and you do an LS You'll probably find several things that in a traditional desktop environment will start up at startup so I Usually have dropbox and for whatever reason Skype decides it has to restart or start up every time the computer starts up What I ended up having to do is create this up dot desktop file So if I've been meant to up dot desktop, this is what I ended up having to do I had to create an up script and exact that up script that was from the themes folder and Then add that make sure it wasn't gonna start in a terminal Tell it was an application type and then tell it not to notify me when it started So that actually got went through and worked and that left me with the setup you see here now if we CD back into dot-config left WM and themes and then CD into basic poly bar and do an LS you'll see basically This is the same stuff that was in current because we've went through and linked that to get the link those together If we've been into the poly bar config This is just a traditional poly bar config. It Has the main bar here and it's named it bar zero The only thing that seems to be a little bit different now it actually goes through and will Defines a whole bunch of different bars, but they're all basically the same because it went the Theme dot Toml here if we do them into theme dot Toml But it was that's not the right one Which one I was looking for Actually, I think it's gonna be that the up so we've been into the up script here We'll actually see somewhere around here. It will actually go through and yeah right here at the end It will actually try to figure out how many bars you have or how many monitors you have and that will create that many bars Within the poly bar Configuration folder that's really really nice now Because you're using this up for script. You don't have a launch.sh like you would have in other You know situations where you use poly bar and That's kind of cool because I mean we don't have to actually go through and you know deal with a launch to sh Which is always a little weird Especially when you write yourself I've always just kind of stolen the Arco Linux launch.sh file because it works Every time I try to to write the launch.sh folder I always mess up and have it the poly bar just show up on one of my monitors I'm never very good at doing that kind of stuff. So one of the other stuff in this Upscript this is basically your auto start.sh File you can go through and put in here whatever you want to start whenever you restart the window manager So if you want something like nitrogen to restore your wallpaper, you could go through and do that right now This has Feth doing that you can also it also goes through up here at the top and Starts Compton or Pycom so that it goes through and makes your poly bar Transparent a little bit now it does not go through and tell it tell Pycom What configuration Pycom configuration file to use so you can go through and change that if you wanted to use your default Pycom config which I probably will end up doing because I have all of my terminals and stuff Opaque or whatever so I'll go through and tell it to use my Pycom configuration file instead of whatever default it's trying to pull from so that's basically how themes work now there are communities themes and You can find those Here and you can download these now. There's several ones that you could try Now we could go through and actually try one of these, but I'm not sure how it would work But so actually I think I probably won't because I don't want to interrupt my OBS thing by hitting the refresh button I did that once and I don't want to do that again, but there's several of them here that you can try I'm not actually tried any any of these other than the PolyBare ones because I'm not actually sure if This will go through and like do it PolyBare or not. I'm not sure what bar the the Yeah, it uses the Dracula one uses PolyBare as well This it has screenshots of these so we can actually take a look at these now I'm not sure what I say like that one there looks like it has a menu of some kind, which is kind of cool but anyways basically Left WM has this whole theming system or whatever that allows you to Change your colors change your bar or whatever all in a single file and then all of your other stuff that has to do with the Configuration of your window manager like your key bindings and stuff is all done outside of that folder So that you can go through and change your thing however you want without altering your other files It's an interesting concept. I'm not sure if I'm going to like it or not I'm not sure if I'm gonna like only having nine when Workspaces I'm so used to having nine on one monitor nine on the other monitor and having all those things available to me all at the same time I don't know if I'm gonna be happy with just nine. I also don't see a way to make it so that Like in BS PWM, which also has just nine when Workspaces you can define using BS PC which Workspaces appear on which monitor I don't see that capability here, which is gonna drive me bonkers. I'd much rather have So it's kind of a combination of BS PWM which only has the nine workspaces and Q tile which Has nine workspaces and you have to share them between the monitors You can't in Q tile from what I remember at least you can't go through and say hey I want monitor one to have workspace one through five and Works a monitor two to have six through ten You can't do that Like you can like you said like you can in BS PWM and you can do that in I3 obviously in DWM each work each desk or each monitor has Nine workspaces whether you like it or not and that's I'm I'm pretty sure that's the same way with like awesome or awesome And X monad but like I said I haven't played with either of those enough to know for sure now Just in conclusion I'm gonna try this out for a few days at least. I'm gonna try to make it my own. I'm gonna go through and make all the Window I'm gonna go through and make all the key bindings and stuff Work for me. I'm gonna go through and try to figure out some more of the Default key bindings that are actually in there and see if there are all the ones that I haven't explored yet to kind of fix them the Really weird things that I had I found so far like not being able to move to certain monitors And I'm gonna get involved in the community because I'm gonna go through and see if I can talk to Like the devs or something and see if there are things that I'm missing because I don't see any of the stuff for monitor specific stuff And I kind of want to know if that's in there, and it's I'm just not seeing it. So like I said, I'm gonna probably make a Video again in a couple weeks maybe a month or so and we'll see how I'm at, you know still using this or If I'm I've gone back to DWM with my tail between my legs It's entirely possible that I go back to DWM today I'm gonna try I'm gonna try to use left WM full-time for a couple days But my willpower has never been all that great or well Let me free phrase that my patience for nonsense has never been all that great So if I come up across this come across a show stopping thing that I hate in left WM I'll be going right back to DWM So thanks for watching make sure you follow us on Twitter at the Linuxcast Support us on patreon at patreon.com slash Linux cast I would like to take a moment to thank our current patrons Devon Marcus American camp. Thanks for your support Thanks everybody for watching again, and I'll see you next time