Lots of things are missing that you normally take for granted in a full desktop environment like Gnome or KDE. Here are some of the things I’ve noticed so far:

There’s probably a bunch of other things I haven’t even noticed yet. So if you want to live with a minimalist window manager, you have two choices:

Let’s take a look at my ~/.xsessionrc file which should run a bunch of programs when I next start dwm. (I say should because I haven’t logged out and back in yet.)

.xsessionrc

setxkbmap ie
dunst & disown
xautolock -time 10 -locker "xset dpms force off && slock" && disown
~/bin/scripts/dwm_status & disown
xbindkeys -f /home/omf/.xbindkeysrc

The first command is straightforward — it just tells X to use the "English (Ireland)" layout for the keyboard. No problem.

Next, we use Dunst as the system notifier, so that messages displayed with notify-send can be formatted and have arbitrary timeouts. Note the use of command & disown to launch programs as daemons that stay the background.

We then use xautolock and the extremely barebones slock to lock the screen after 10 minutes of inactivity. I also want the screen to turn off when locking, so xset dpms force off does that until we move the mouse or hit a key.

Then, we run a script called dwm_status to periodically update the dwm status bar at the top of the screen. Updating the status bar is done by calling xsetroot -name "(new text)". Let’s have a look at the dwm_status script.

dwm_status

while true; do
  ~/bin/scripts/dwm_status_update
  sleep 30
done

We can see that it just sleeps in a loop, calling dwm_status_update once every 30 seconds. Okay, what’s in that file?

scripts/dwm_status_update

DATE=$(date +"%F %H:%M")
VOLUME=$(pactl list sinks | grep 'Volume: front-left' | awk '{print $5}')

xsetroot -name "⏰ $DATE | 🔊 $VOLUME"

Okay, now we have something. So our status bar so far just has the date/time and system volume. We used pactl and some ugly grep/awk to get what we needed. It’s a shame there’s no machine-readable output from pactl. You set the volume by calling set-sink-volume but there’s no get-sink-volume which would have been handy.

You might ask why this is split into two scripts. That’s because I want to be able to do things that immediately update the status bar without waiting 30 seconds. The last action in .xsessionrc, calling xbindkeys, gives an example of that.

.xbindkeysrc

"~/bin/scripts/vol_up"
Mod4 + KP_Add

"~/bin/scripts/vol_down"
Mod4 + KP_Subtract

Note that Mod4 means Super, otherwise known as "Windows key". So Super+Numkey_PLUS/MINUS raise or lower the volume by a small increment. Let’s look at one of those scripts.

scripts/vol_up

SINK=$(pactl list sinks short | grep RUNNING | awk '{ print $2 }')

pactl set-sink-volume $SINK +5%
~/bin/scripts/dwm_status_update

This sets the volume up by 5% then calls the status bar update script. Note that you can get the desired sink name with pactl list sinks | grep Name:.

So far it’s been a fun journey, and it certainly seems to yield a noticeable performance improvement on this fairly old laptop. There are a few limitations that I’m still not super happy with, like the fact that you can only run one instance of xautolock, so you can’t have e.g. the screen switching off (with DPMS) after 2 minutes idle, but locking after 10 minutes. They have to both happen in the same single step.

On the other hand, dwm includes the fantastic dmenu which functions as an application launcher, but can also be used in interactive scripts to do cool things. More on that in future maybe.

I’m not sure if I’ll stick with this minimalist setup, but it’s certainly doable and you’ll undoubtedly learn from the process.

Some other things I’ve taken for granted with full desktop environments that don’t come out of the box with dwm:

All of these are things you can probably replace with alternative tools (or write your own) without a huge effort, but it’s easy to forget how useful they are until you don’t have them.