penrose - a tiling window manager library

penrose is a library for configuring your own X11 window manager in Rust. It uses a workspace model (as opposed to tags) and is built on top of the XCB API. The project is very much a work in progress as I try to set up my ideal, minimal window manager for daily use. penrose is now feature complete enough and stable enough to use as your primary Window Manager, so long as you don't mind a few rough edges! I am aiming for the code to be well documented and easy to extend. For now, this is my primary hobby project so updates are frequent: I try to keep crates.io up to date but please check the git repo for latest changes.

Current project status

While the project is still in its early stages, please expect there to be multiple breaking changes as the public API stabilises. The example config file will always be kept up to date so please refer to that for updating to newer versions published to cargo.

If you don't mind a bare bones (really bare bones) window manager then you can take penrose for a spin using the config in the examples directory. You will need to update the keybindings to launch your preferred terminal emulator and program launcher and may want to adjust the floating window classes to handle some additional programs.

Current functionality

• partial EWMH support (active window/desktop, number of desktops, desktop names, window manager name, desktop for client)
• user defined layout functions (side_stack, bottom_stack and paper implemented)
• layout resizing and modification
• configurable window borders for focused / unfocused
• configurable gaps
• configurable keybindings (internal methods and external programs)
• workspaces
• moving clients between workspaces
• kill focused client
• cycle focus
• drag focused client through stack
• floating windows
• multi-monitor support

Project Non-goals

• A config file

  • Parsing a config file and dynamically switching behaviour on the contents adds a huge amount of complexity to the code. I'd much rather keep the code simple and well documented so that modifying it is easy and then just recompile.

• IPC / relying on external programs

  • I love acme from plan9 and how easy it is to drive it's state from external programs (check out my acme-corp tools to see what I mean) but that comes at the expense of the internal logic becoming massively more complicated. As few moving parts as possible is ideal. So, things that are easy to acomplish using the XCB api (key bindings, simple rendering of a bar etc) are in, full on IPC via an exposed API is out.

Current Work

See the TODO file in the root of the repo for next steps and ongoing work. I'm trying to keep it mostly up to date but the docs/TODOs and the codebase may diverge at points when I forget to update things. If in doubt, read the source.