About wm_helper

Add-on functionality for X11 window-managers.

This application lets you move around, resize and focus windows based on surrounding windows. It's basically an addition to your regular window manager. The idea is to bind keyboard commands to wm_helper which will manipulate the currently active window.

There is no connection to the window manager, so wm_helper can be used with any wm (or at least wm's that behave, see the Bugs section for issues).

It's mainly aimed at stacking window managers that allows the user to organize windows manually. It's not really usable for tiling window managers.

Many of wm_helper's functions are inspired by functionality built-in to Fvwm and Sawfish. It was created mainly to get these functions when using Xfwm4 or other window managers.

Actions currently built in:

• Move window in a given direction until it hits another window or the screen boundary. This is called "shuffle" in Fvwm3 and "pack" in Sawfish.
• Extend a window in a given direction until it hits another window or the screen boundary. This is called "grow" in Fvwm and Sawfish.
• Extend a window in all directions until it's borders hits another window or the screen boundary.
• Focus a neighbouring window in a given direction. In Fvwm this can be done with a combination of the Direction, Focus and WarpToWindow functions.
• Raise and lower the active window.

Status

Alpha quality; under heavy development. There are problems interacting with some window managers. Interaction with Fvwm2 and Xfwm4 is tested and works.

Building

You can build either with static or dynamic linking.

Static will include all needed libraries in the finished executable, and it will therefore be larger. But it will work on other systems than which it is built on, without having to install any extra libraries.

Dynamic needs the required libraries (and correct versions of them) to be installed on any computers the application should be run on.

Static linking

Dependencies for building:

• Podman
• m4

(Docker should probably also work with minor changes to the Makefile, but it's untested.)

Run make static or make static-release to build the binary.

Dynamic linking

Dependencies for building:

• Crystal
• libxinerama-dev
• libx11-dev
• m4

Run make or make release to build the binary.

Installation

Copy bin/wm_helper to a directory in your path, like $HOME/.local/bin (for the current user) or /usr/local/bin (for system-wide use).

Usage

Run wm_helper -h for a list of actions. See About for description about the actions.

Use your window manager / desktop environment configuration to bind a keyboard shortcut to a command. For example these are my bindings ("Super" is a.k.a. "Win"):

• Super+PageUp: wm_helper --raise
• Super+PageUp: wm_helper --lower
• Super+Right: wm_helper --fr
• Ctrl+Super+Right: wm_helper --gr
• Shift+Super+Right: wm_helper --mr
• Ctrl+Super+Return: wm_helper --ga

(Repeat for left, up and down)

Bugs

• Grow and move doesn't work over multiple screens
• If a window has size steps (SizeHints.width_inc, SizeHints.height_inc), like f.ex. xterm, consider these (in addition to base_width and base_height) when calculating new size/pos
• If wm does not support _NET_CLIENT_LIST_STACKING no other windows are found
• Under Blackbox, Fluxbox etc, windows are moved to the wrong position

Contributors

Created by Tomas Åkesson tomas@entropic.se

See LICENSE for license details.

Project homepage: https://gitlab.com/entropic-software/wm-helper