devlog #5 - self hosted?

ok it’s been quite a while since my last devlog but i’ve added a ton of new stuff - to the point where nwwm might become my main window manager soon!

docks n’ struts

“what even are those?” i hear you ask, and fear not because i am here to answer. a docked window is any kind of window that isn’t tiled, doesn’t belong to any workspace, and reserves space on the screen that other windows can’t take up. a really common example is a status bar: it persists between desktops, and reserves space on the screen. a strut is basically the space on the screen that it reserves. i implemented support for this so you can now use your favourite status bar with nwwm! i also spent like 3 hours debugging an error that happened sometimes when you closed a docked window, and ended up fixing it by complete accident

workspaces 🧰

a window manager is basically useless without workspaces, so naturally i’ve added them to nwwm. they were actually quite easy to implement since i’ve technically supported them since day 1 i just never added workspace switching. basically when you switch a workspace it checks to see if the workspace exists, then it unfocuses the current window, unmaps (hides) all the windows in the current workspace, switches to the new workspace, maps (shows) all the windows in the new workspace, and focuses the first window in the new workspace. phew, try saying that in one breath!

status bar compatibility

as i mentioned earlier, i added struts and docks so that status bars can reserve space on the screen, but i also added some ewmh hints that allow status bars to see and change the current desktop. this was really easy, i just had to add some atoms and listen for ClientMessage events, and then connect those to my existing code

next steps

• config file loading
• more ewmh 😭