The window manager documentation and examples I found were for the Xlib C library. I personally found C easier to use because a lot of If you’re not comfortable writing C, there are also libraries that let you work

the dwm source code (dwm is a 2000-line-of-C window manager).

I found it really helpful when debugging.

xtrace lets you trace all requests to the X windows system that your window manager is making.

I compiled my window manager with gcc bouncewm.c -g -o bouncewm -lX11 and ran it with env DISPLAY=:1.

You can start an xterm in the Xephyr desktop with xterm -display :1.

I ran it like this: Xephyr -ac -screen 1280x1024 -br -reset -terminate 2> /dev/null :1 &

Xephyr lets you embed an X session in a window in your regular desktop, so that you can develop your toy window manager without breaking your usual desktop.

I did this challenge by modifying tinywm and it worked really well. There’s a Python version of tinywm too, but I wasn’t able to get it to work. This is a GREAT starting point and there’sĪn annotated version of the source code which explains a lot of the details.

Writing a window manager from scratch seems intimidating (at first I didn’tĮven know how to start!).

It turns out implementing this kind of toy window manager is surprisingly approachable! the setup: start with tinywmĪll the instructions here only work on Linux (since this is about writing a Linux window manager). literally any of the other things you might normally expect a window manager to do.The window manager doesn’t need to do anything else! It doesn’t need to support:

The goal here is to make a very silly Linux window manager that bounces its windowsĪround the screen, like in the gif above. Hello! I’m writing a short series of programming challenges with

Windows window organizer