HOWTO WMII
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[edit] About WMII
WMII is a dynamic window manager for X11. Dynamic window management means that it places the windows for you; you won't have to manually move or resize windows unless you want to. It supports classic and dynamic window management with extended keyboard, mouse, and filesystem based remote control. It replaces the workspace paradigm with a new tagging approach. A large influence is the 9P window manager.
WMII is, for the most part, a tiling window manager. Though, it has many layouts, such as default, maximum, and stacking. There is also a floating mode, similar to traditional window managers.
Its minimalist philosophy attempts to not exceed 10.000 lines of code (including all shipped utilities and libraries), to enforce simplicity and clarity.
View the official website here: http://wmii.suckless.org/
[edit] Getting WMII
WMII has just got a highly-needed update from 2 to 3.6 in Portage. Thanks to Omp.
[edit] Dependencies
It depends on libixp, which provides standalone 9P client/server interface, and dmenu, which provides a customizable and dynamic menu system. Everything is maintained by Denis Grelich.
[edit] Using Portage Tree
You can get it by a simple
emerge wmii
or, if you use Paludis, an alternative to Portage
paludis -i wmii
[edit] Using WMII
[edit] Startx Method
The most basic way of getting WMII to start is adding
exec wmii
to the ~/.xinitrc file.
[edit] Usage
You should get a popup on your first start of WMII that explains basic usage.
To see it again, press Alt-a, right arrow twice, enter. Or press, Alt-a, w, enter.
- Alt+Enter
- open xterm
- Alt+k
- cycles focus (up)
- Alt+j
- cycles focus (down)
- Alt+h
- cycles focus (left)
- Alt+l
- cycles focus (right)
- Alt+d
- default layout (equal)
- Alt+s
- stacking layout (max)
- Alt+p
- program menu
- Alt-Shift-c
- close window
[edit] Editing Configuration
WMII comes with a base configuration. The base configuration consists of the following scripts: wmiirc, status, welcome, and quit.
The global configuration files can be found at /etc/wmii-3.5/, or /etc/wmii-$version where version is the major version number.
Though, since it is preferred that we use local files, lets copy over the configuration files to a local, user-specific location.
cp /etc/wmii-3.5/* ~/.wmii-3.5/
