Installing DWM

Make sure you have a user already

Install Xorg

pacman -S xorg-server xorg-xinit xorg-xrandr xorg-xsetroot

Install git

pacman -S git

Install a browser

pacman -S firefox

Create a config directory

mkdir ~/.config

Install DWM

git clone git://git.suckless.org/dwm ~/.config/dwm
git clone git://git.suckless.org/st ~/.config/st
git clone git://git.suckless.org/dmenu ~/.config/dmenu

cd ~/.config/dwm && sudo make install
cd ~/.config/st && sudo make install
cd ~/.config/dmenu && sudo make install

Installing a Display Manager (DM)

pacman -S lightdm

pacman -S lightdm-gtk-greeter

pacman -S lightdm-gtk-greeter-settings

Enable lightdm service

sudo systemctl enable lightdm

Adding an entry for DWM in the DM

Open this file:

mkdir /usr/share/xsessions

vim /usr/share/xsessions/dwm.desktop

Add the following:

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Dwm
Comment=the dynamic window manager
Exec=dwm
Icon=dwm
Type=XSession

Basic Commands

• Moving between windows: [Alt]+[j] or [Alt]+[k]

• To move a terminal to another tag: [Shift]+[Alt]+[<TAG_NUMBER>]

• To focus on another tag: [Alt]+[tag number]

• To change the amount of windows in the master area: [Alt]+[d] (Decrease) or [Alt]+[i] (Increase)

• To toggle a window between the master and stack area: [Alt]+[Return]

• To kill a window: [Shift]+[Alt]+[c]

• Click another tag with the right mouse button to bring those windows into your current focus.

Layouts

( Note ) By default dwm is in tiled layout mode.

• Tiled: [Alt]+[t]

• Floating: [Alt]+[f]

• Monocle: [Alt]+[m]

Further layout modes can be included through patches.

Floating

To resize the floating window: [Alt]+[right mouse button]

To move it around [Alt]+[left mouse button]

Floating in Tiled Layout

• Toggle floating mode on the active window: [Alt]+[Shift]+[space]

• Resize the window: [Alt]+[right mouse button]

• toggle it in being floating [Alt]+[middle mouse button]

If you want to set some type of window to be always floating, look at the config.def.h and the rules array, where the last but one element defines this behaviour.

Quitting

To quit dwm cleanly: [Shift]+[Alt]+[q]

Status

By default dwm is showing dwm-X.X in its statusbar. This text can be changed by setting the WM_NAME property of the root window.

Using the tools of X.org, this can be set using:

xsetroot -name "Some Text"