 DWM has been my window manager of choice for well over a year and Every time I switch away from it or go to try a new window manager I always end up going back because it's just so good and I'm so used to it and it has all my key Bindings and it has scratch pads and I've set up xxsx HKD So I have my key cords and it's just it's a familiar place for me And I'm happy it's there but in the last week or so I've been playing around with DWM and basically what I ended up doing was taking my old Configuration and just shuffling it off into a dot old file and starting completely over now Those are you who watched the channel for any of length of time know that I like changing things specifically I like to write stuff and One of the things I wanted to do with DWM was go through and to do a lot of alterations to the bar itself I wanted to add the Bar padding patch. I wanted to go through and change from SL status to DWM blocks I wanted to go through and add some click events to the modules in my bar And I wanted to have more flexibility when it comes to selecting colors Not only for the modules, but also for the tags themselves I've been messing around with it now for a week. The problem is is that the Whole process was kind of a pain in the butt And I made me realize that the DWM bar is just not as customizable as I really want it to be It's not obviously a big deal. I mean in in the grand scheme of things This is not going to affect my productivity whatsoever It's just another one of those superfluous things that I like to mess around with so I had a choice I could continue to keep messing around with it I could go back to my old configuration Which was basically refined to the point where I just enjoyed it so much or I could switch window managers and What I decided to do was actually switch window managers. I've done that now I've this is my third day now on a brand new window manager now I've used BS PWM before Several times before I've raced it on video before I've been using it on streams when I did my long-term review of Debian that was the window manager that I chose to use so I've used BS PWM many times before but I've never Really lived in it for a long period of time on my main machine Mostly because there's also a DWM install here and I always Moved back to that now I decided to go through and do this For multiple reasons, but the biggest is that because the BS PWM does not come with a bar you can choose what bar you use and I've chosen poly bar Poly bar is amazing and has a ton of configuration options and there's just a ton of stuff you can do with it So it kind of opens up the possibilities for along me to tweak things pretty much forever I mean, it's probably going to be a huge like time sink But we'll talk about that another day the the point is is that because I can use poly bar easily And it's meant to be used with other bars I'll be able to go through and just go ahead and tweak to my heart's content with DWM You can use poly bar if you want to but everybody I've talked to several people in my discord have just told me how much Of a pain in the ass it is to get you know, you're working with poly bar. So honestly, I didn't even try It's probably something that I'll go back to eventually just for fun But I really didn't want to put that effort into it now. So I've switched BS PWM So I want to show you what my BS PWM looks like right now So this is what we're at right now Obviously, like I said, I have poly bar up there and I've changed my wallpaper and I have the terminal theme There are a few things I still haven't raised yet. I haven't raised like the the dunce notifications yet I haven't gone through and added a different GTK theme yet So there's still some stuff that I need to do and I want to add a couple more modules to poly bar But I haven't decided what that those are yet I know I want to get like a update one working and maybe a temperature went up there or something But that's for you know as they go along And I'm also going to do a video probably coming up pretty soon About adding click events to each of these modules so that when I click on them, they do something Not something I'll probably plan on using all that much because I don't use my mouse all that much to interact with things on my Bar like I don't I mean every once in a while You'll see me on camera and shake my mouse and go up to a workspace and click on it I don't do that that often. Thank goodness, but sometimes That method that muscle memory or whatever just gets me my hands already on the mouse So I you know go over there and do that anyways, but the point is this is BSPWM This is the way I have it now. So let me talk about my initial experience I've been using this now full-time for three days. I haven't logged into DWM for three days And there are some things that I like a lot about BSPWM. There are some things that are Not so great. So let's start off with the positive stuff. I like Pre-selection so if I go through and do something like this, I can pre-select Where the next window is going to be so in that way, this is very much kind of like I3 It's a manual tiling window manager, but also if I don't pre-select. It's just Something like this and so that in that way, it's kind of a dynamic window manager It's not really but the point is it's cool that way and I like that I also like that the configuration file is nothing but a shell script That's all it is really all this does is continuously Call one specific program BSPC so it could be a shell script or bash script You probably could also run this in other, you know interpreters as well if you wanted to But the point is I like that it's this way because you know I know at least a little bit of bash so I can go through and add stuff that I wanted to and The syntax is just really easy. So it's not It was kind of a breath of fresh air moving away from DWM where everything is written in C And you have to know the syntax of state now I got really good at it at least in terms of DWM But the point is is it's still overly complex and when something goes wrong in DWM You have to kind of know how to troubleshoot that with BSP WM at least with the configuration file errors It'd be pretty easy to suss out what that you know problem would be just because it's just it's just a shell script so The other thing I really like is that I have complete control over the number of workspaces that I have now I'm sure that in DWM you could probably do this as well But I never even tried because it was overly complicated and I would have had a mess with the source code with BSP DWM I can go through and have 20 workspaces now everybody knows I'm obsessed with workspaces right now. I'm using one two three four five six on this monitor One two three four five on this monitor So I have some free ones. That's the travesty. I need to fill those things up the point is is because I can Control not only how many workspaces I have but also which monitors they show up on I could theoretically go through And add 20 per monitor if I want to now. I think that's probably a little overkill but I could if I wanted to at one point I had 14 on both and the Problem I mostly ran into was trying to figure out how to assign the key bindings to the ones after 10 Because then you have to add in extra modifier keys I'm still gonna be tweaking that because frankly, I don't know if 20 is enough. I Don't know. I mean I don't know if 20 is enough But anyways, I like that part of it. Now the biggest pain point I've seen so far is scratch pads Now everybody knows I love my scratch pads scratch pads are basically applications that show up Via key binding and then go away via the same key binding, but they're don't really close They're they kind of live on an invisible workspace BSPWM does not have this functionality built in by default it just doesn't and That is a very sad for me. So I've kind of hacked together a solution because I couldn't use this without it If I couldn't have found at least some mediocre solution, I wouldn't have made it three days So what I've gone through and done is created a series of rules here at the bottom as you can see and Those are for different either terminal applications or regular applications that will then then can be triggered by a key binding So for example, I have super M Will do my mail client So that's Neomutt and then the difference here is that it opens up every time I press that key bank. So if I Keep pressing that it doesn't go away like a normal scratch pad What I actually do is have like five instances of Neomutt there. I Super N has pulse mixture on it, but I had to quit that in order for it to go away like super super Q in order for it to go away. So that's not really a scratch pad So no because nothing runs in the background So if I open up a terminal via scratch pad like this and run H top In a normal situation in a normal place where you actually have scratch pads You could go through and press that key binding again, and it would go away in this case it actually just opens up another terminal and in order to get rid of this I actually have to quit it. So if I go back to that scratch pad, it's gone now I have read a few places where there's some kind of Like even more hacky way of doing this so that it will stay open But none of them work really well So if there's a thing that it's going to get me to stop using BSPWM, you know within the next few days It's going to be that scratch pad functionality. That's just not quite where I want it to be now I know there are third-party Applications, I know there's like tilde tilde is a term a terminal that will allow you to It's basically a drop-down terminal But it's would go through and allow you to have that scratch pad functionality I know other terminal drop-down terminals kind of do the same thing. So I could try to do that I'm not sure if I really want to do a third-party thing or I know that there's like a third-party actual scratch pad Like application. I think it's called teedrop teflop something like that. I've never actually gotten that to work I may give it another try The point is the scratch pad things is the the one area of BSPWM that I just Don't like all that much because it doesn't exist. So yeah, that is my BSPWM setup as of right now now This is going to evolve over. I'm gonna try to give this a full month I want to go longer than that, but we'll see how it goes I'm just I'm gonna dedicate myself to a month not going into DWM using BSPWM and I'll make another video after that month is over and Probably kind of talk about my thoughts of how that month went I don't expect the thoughts to change that much because I actually really like BSPWM I always have depending on what day you ask me really between i3 and BSPWM, which when I like better would probably change There are several things about BSPWM that I like better than i3. There's several things i3 that I like better than BSPWM So a month from now I don't know how that perception is going to change because I lived in i3 for a long time. So I know a Lot about it and I know what I like and dislike about it I lived in DWM for a long time and I know what I like and what I dislike about it So we'll see how my perception of BSPWM changes after using it for a month So that's it for this video a little bit of rambly video And I'll probably do like a workflow video Maybe if you're interested in that if you're interested in that make sure you hit the subscribe button and leave a like I Definitely consider doing that. You can also leave a comment on this video if you have thoughts on BSPWM I'd love to hear from you. You can follow me on Twitter at the Linuxcast You can support me on patreon at patreon.com slash Linuxcast before I go. I would like to take a moment to thank my current patrons Sit a Devon Chris East Coast Webgent who's fun to petrico primus Marcus Maglin jack-in-the-pool Steve a Mitchell art center and Matias carbon-dated Merrick camp drashfully j-dog the beast is rock peter a and crucible. Thanks everyone for watching. I'll see you next time