 I'm always on the lookout for really cool tiling window managers to take a look at. And over the last year or so I've taken a look at quite a few and each one of them has a certain way of doing something interesting. So what I thought I'd do today is take a look at a brand new window manager that I just found called BerryWM. Now I first discovered this on Jake Atlenex's YouTube channel. Go ahead and give him a subscribe. I'll put a link in the video description. He did a video talking about BerryWM and it just looked really interesting. So what I thought I'd do today is take a look at how to install this and how it's configured because it's actually configured very similar to BSPWM in that it uses a program to manipulate the windows. So if you're familiar with BSPWM, you've probably heard of BSPC before. And what BSPC does is it does all the work for BSPWM. It's even how the configuration file works. Berry is similar to that and then it has a program that manipulates the windows and so on and so forth in order to actually do the job of being a window manager. The differences between them is that BSPWM has a ton more features than Berry does and Berry is actually much more minimal. So if you're searching for a very minimal window manager, Berry might be a good option for you. So what we're going to do today is install it and take a first look at it. So let's go ahead and jump in. Now here we are in just a stock standard version of Ubuntu. Now I've decided to do Ubuntu because the instructions for the installation for Berry actually point you towards Ubuntu first. So I decided just to do it in Ubuntu. Now if you are using a different distribution, Berry is in the AUR. They also have packages for Void, Kiss Linux and several others as long as and they also have a Debian package if you wanted to install it through a Debian package. But I've decided to just build it the old fashioned way. So that means we're going to have to install the dependencies, make sure we have some programs installed and so on and so forth. So the first thing we'll do here is bring up their website. We'll wait for the snap package to load of Firefox which takes forever. Still waiting. Still waiting. Thank you. Oh there we go. And people wonder why I don't like snaps. So we'll just do Berry window manager. And here we go. Here's the website and we'll get to installation first. So we're going to open up a terminal. So first we're going to need some programs. So I'll zoom in here, sudo apt install sx HKD we're going I'm going to need kitty. I'm going to need a Vim because Vim is not installed on Ubuntu by default. We're going to need git. And I think that that's it. So we'll do that enter our password and wait for that to install shouldn't take very long. Now we're going to also need to create an X profile file. So we'll do touch dot X profile and we'll change the we'll make that executable see each mod plus X and then X profile. And then we're going to them into X dot X profile. And we'll do this so so first we'll put a put shebang. So like this bin bash. And then usually they have this like this here dot X profile and then sx HKD dash C and then we're going to do total slash dollar sign home slash dot config slash Barry slash sx HKD RC that file doesn't exist yet, but it will here in a minute. So we'll do an end there so it keeps running and rain quit that now that's done clear that now it's time to actually install Barry so so we're going to do first is install the dependencies for very Barry so pseudo app install lib X 11 dev and then lib XFT dev and lib Xenorama dev okay and install those yes and there we go now that that's installed we can actually download and make the package actually before we can download Barry there's one more thing we have to do and that's to pseudo app install build essential and that will make sure we have make installed because otherwise make wouldn't work because it's not installed now that that's installed we can go ahead and clone the repository so we're going to copy this line here control C control should be CD into Barry which is the file that was cloned into and we'll run make and pseudo make install and that's done there now the last thing we have to do well actually there's two more things we have to do so we have to copy over the example configuration files so we're going to CD we're going to make directory dollar sign we'll just do till the slash we don't have to do dollar sign home a dot config and then Barry and then we're going to copy this line here this is going to copy the default configuration file for SXHKD into the proper place there and I'm going to actually move my head out of the way actually I'm just gonna get rid of my head all the altogether off with this head there we go that's much better so the next thing we'll want to do is the next one here control C here do this one here and if you're going to follow along with me make sure you're still in the directory of Barry which you downloaded through get otherwise those paths won't be correct because you're copying from the examples folder but it's not an absolute path now that that's done we need to clear this and go into Sleedy slash user share X sessions now this only applies if you're using a display manager if you're using something like arching you're just using in an X and R C file you don't need to do this you can just do it in your X and R C file do exec Barry and that would work but I'm using a display manager GDM in this case so what I will need to do is add a entry for Barry into my X sessions folder so first pseudo touch Barry desktop and then we're going to pseudo and of them into Barry desktop and then we're gonna scroll down here to the bottom and copy this I'm glad that they gave this all typed out so I don't actually type it out I can just copy and paste and add a couple extra spaces right quit out of that now if I'm correct in my calculations I believe we can now log out of Ubuntu or out of the genome here and into Barry itself so we can get a first look at what Barry looks like okay so once you've installed Barry and you've logged out and logged back in this is what you're going to get and except for this part up here which sometimes won't go away it should go away now that's just part of the manager thing one thing I did have to do between those jump cuts is go back into my X profile and change this because I made a typo where I did till the slash I did something like this till the slash you probably noticed that when I was typing that earlier that's just me being a dumbass so we'll make sure that that is appropriate so this is what Barry looks like out of the box there's not much here there's not a wallpaper there's not a bar there's nothing so super enter is the means to get to a terminal now there's one other thing that I forgot to install in order for us to actually do anything so we needed to pseudo apt install the menu and you have to actually spell that right otherwise it won't install obviously seriously spelling is for other people apparently so once the menu is installed we can use the menu to launch programs and so on and so forth but first super M will take us full screen and then I can get the proper resolution here and then what we're going to do is take a look at the sxHKD file so I'm going to go into CD into .config Barry and then into sxHKD RC so here are the default key bindings that you'll need to know super return is going to bring up your terminal now why install kitty was because I prefer kitty by default your XVT has to be installed if you don't have your XVT installed it won't actually and you open up a terminal for you when you hit super returns so either go into sxHKD before you enter Barry and change it to a terminal of your choice in this file here or install your XVT super D is going to bring up the menu and super escape will restart sxHKD if you've made changes to this file now here's where Barry gets interesting so like I said at the beginning Barry is very similar to BSPWM in that it has a terminal program that goes along with it that does basically all of the work for being a window manager so for BSPWM it's BSPC for Barry it's Barry C and Barry C will just like you see here do things to the windows so super hjkl will move the windows up and down and so on and so forth super shift and those will resize the windows and so on so forth if you want to use a more of a like a full screen tiling window manager thing do super m they'll take into monocle mode super f will take you to full screen super n will get rid of the borders around the windows and you can use super o to snap left super p to snap right super c to snap to the center those are almost literally all of the bindings that they have there's a couple other ones so like super key will quit super tab will cycle through windows and then it assigns a pointer focus to the button to the mouse button that's all of the key bindings it has by default very super minimal so if we get out of this here go into the actual configuration file which is called auto start it's just a bash script similar to BSPWM again and this is what it does it will allow you to set the border whip within the gaps it will allow you to change the colors of the decorations which is the obviously the part here which can I was to get rid of with control n and you can change a few other options so one of the things that we should do here is go to the second workspace open up Firefox wait for the snap to open for the first time which takes forever go into full screen mode and we'll go back to very WM and it actually has fairly good documentation so there are a ton of other options that you can set up in order to do other things so the documentation has a list of all the things that you can do and it also has a list of several things you can use for windows called internal states which allow you to determine the state of a window that will then allow you to do things like script for certain situations so that is also really cool it's very much a reliant on you creating your own scripts to do certain things and you can use Barry see in order to manipulate windows in certain ways inside of a script that would then be able to be assigned in sxhkd for a key binding so let's just say we wanted to get rid of the title hi I'm very curious to see if we change this to zero if that just gets rid of it so we'll write this one thing I didn't see was how to actually restart Barry is there I wonder if there's a way to do that so normally super ship like R would restart it but I didn't see anything like that in so if we've been it been been back into sxhkdrc and see if there's actually a key binding to restart Barry I didn't see one and I don't see a way to do that on their website either but I'm I wonder if it's in the man page so if I open up another terminal here and do man after zooming in here Barry see if there's actually anything here to restart it it doesn't appear to be anything else in the man page except for just this one you know block of text either that or Vim's not allowing me to scroll down it says it looks like there's something below this otherwise why would this be centered but it doesn't appear and it says in their documentation here all these commands can be viewed in your system be of all Barry see that's what we need to go to so quit this man Barry see there we go that's better oh yeah much better let's see if there's anything here to restart otherwise we're going to log out and log back in that'd be kind of annoying as you can see that this is very very minimal it's not something I really noticed but uh you could script it so that it would behave like a tiling wind manager using Barry see stop the program quit all right so I don't actually see a way to restart Barry see or restart Barry wind manager so we're just going to do a log out here and see if my change there actually made any you know changes I'm sure there's probably a way and I'm just missing it yeah so making that change actually did get rid of the title bar so that's an interesting way of doing it and it's kind of similar to what I three does in order to get rid of the title bar and I three up to set the border to nothing so if we go back into Barry here and then them into auto start again these are the changes that you can make there's again not a lot there and it's not necessarily something that I would consider all that usable but also it's not because that the features aren't really there I have a feeling that the thing for restarting is probably there is you probably could add like a like a loop or something similar to what you do with DWM if you wanted to in like your ex in at RC if you wanted to do something like that and you can I wonder if you could just kill Barry see all together if it would restart it that might be a possibility for something to get to restart the reason why I said it's what not usable isn't because there aren't features that are available to you but more because it's reliant upon you creating scripts to actually make it usable in your own way now for me personally it's not necessarily for me because I'm not a big floating window manager kind of guy and I didn't see a way to at least out of the box set the window manager to default to the monocle mode automatically and even that's not really tiling because it's just everything's going to open up full screen so I'd have to go through and actually try to understand it a little bit more but on a first look I would say that if you're interested in a very very minimal window manager this is definitely an option for you I'd definitely give it a try because it's one of the a lot of times with these smaller window managers when you're trying to install them they have something funky that has to happen or they're hard to get up and running or they're lacking features for multi monitor or something like that this one doesn't seem to have those problems I saw several options for monitor configuration in the man page there so I'm assuming that it would work fairly well with multiple monitors and outside of that the installation was really really easy especially if you're on arches you could just do do a yay dash s berry and it would install it for you so that is very window manager again go check jake at linux's youtube channel out he's getting really close to a thousand subscribers so maybe we can bump him up just a little bit if you have comments on this window manager you can leave those in the comment section below you can follow me on twitter at the next cast you can support me on patreon at patreon.com slash linux cast before I go I'd like to take a moment to thank my current patrons Robert Sid Devon Patrick Fred Kramer Megalyn Jackson Tull Steve A. Seberger linux Gary Samuel Mitchell Art Center Carver David Jeremy Shawn Odin Marnie Vlad Andy Ross Merrick Cam Joshua E. J. Dodd Peter A. Crucible third bend sticks and primus thanks everybody for watching I'll see you next time