The name says it all, this program puts Emacs in charge of wmii, allowing elisp-based configuration and manipulation. This makes wmii completely configurable via Emacs Lisp and also allows for incorporation of Emacs functionality in wmii - for example, the default function for date and time uses (current-time)
The code reflects the quick and dirty development process and will be subject to many changes. It works as-is though.
Here’s a screenshot of wmii with wmii-el in action:
Everything in it is costumisable of course, the main difference being that with wmii-el one can do it using Emacs Lisp.
There is no shortage of tilling window managers nowadays; since wmii development has (apparently) stalled why should one care?
The answer is bound to be different for everyone, but for me:
- The dynamic tilling model of wmii hits the sweetspot between being restricted to some predefined layouts and allowing all sorts of partitioning
- The way it is configured is something I personally find attractive: via reading and writing to files, using the 9P protocol. This makes it easy to integrate with everything.
- While “minimal” by most standards it comes with enough functionality to do without external applications (including some useful tools like wimenu)
- It draws titlebars in windows. For some this is uneeded, for me it makes it aesthetically pleasing in managed mode and essential in unmanaged (floating) mode
- The code itself is compact and has, with minor upkeep, withstood the passage of years.
This version of wmii-el works with the latest wmii code available at https://code.google.com/p/wmii ; this is important because there was a change in the format of wmii files and this version will not work with wmii versions which use the old-style formats.
For those using Emacs stumpwm, a Common Lisp window manager, is a popular choice (in the real of minimalist window managers, of course, since most Emacs users use more mainstream window managers or systems where the concept doesn’t exist). Using Emacs with wmii is a different approach, one that is obviously less Lisp-like in terms of the core components (e.g. there is no REPL for the wmii binary) but on the other hand tries to make it almost transparent to use from Emacs and Emacs Lisp: after loading wmii all aspects of it are exposed and changed directly in Emacs. Note that this comes with a price: there is plenty that now depends on Emacs, but in my years using this my experience has bee very good.
Put wmii.el somewhere in the load-path and add something
like the following to init.el:
Only the first and last lines are fundamental; note that a
substantially more extensive init file is included, albeit not loaded
by default. Copying that file to ~/.emacs.d and loading it is a good
way to start modifying it.
On wmii’s end it is necessary to prevent it from loading the default shell-based wmiirc. This can be acomplished by launching it with the “-r” flag, e.g.
wmii -r ~/.wmii/wmiirc_emacs
A sample wmiirc_emacs is also included, which merely starts emacs (the
initialisation is done after emacs is running, in init.el as per
above). This is merely an example and more elaborate starting
strategies are possible (e.g. using emacsclient, running emacs in
batch mode, etc).
The default keybindings are probably less than ideal for most Emacs users since I opted to use the arrow-keys for client movement (I prefer it that way). Changing them is however just a matter or redefining wmii-key-action-alist and evaluate (wmii-add-keybindings)
The keybindings can be seen in wmii.el, but a quick description of the most used commands:
- Mod4-<arrow key>: select client to the right/left/up/down
- Mod4-Shift-<arrow key>: move client to the right/left/up/down
- Mod4-s: stacked column mode
- Mod4-m: max column mode
- Mod4-d: default column mode
- Mod4-f: toggle fullscreen
- Mod4-Enter: launch X terminal
- Mod4-Space: toggle between managed and floating layers views
- Mod4-Shift-Space: move client between managed and floating layers
- Mod4-x: invoke wimenu to launch a program
- Mod4-Shift-x: (experimental) invoke a elisp function
- Mod4-(0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9): change to numbered view
- Mod4-Shift-(0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9): retag client with numbered tag
- Mod4-t: prompt and change to view
- Mod4-Shift-t: prompt and retag client
This version is quite comparable in funcionality with the default wmiirc. A lot can be done to improve it though, namely by the ability to define functions to handle specific events (either directly or via hooks) and by using the provided primitives to create more complex functionality. Some examples are already included in the wmiicfg.el file.
The interface with wmii uses the “wmiir” executable: while it is possible (and code-wise cleaner) to mount the 9p filesystem that isn’t an option in all the architectures. In the future it would be interesting to allow for both options.
The wmii logo used is part of the wmii distribution.