Suckless Dwm Dmenu and St

I’ve been a fan of minimalist software for quite a while now, and I’m always looking for more simple and reliable technology. Suckless is a community of programmers who have made some great pieces of minimalist software that I recently started using. In this post, I want to showcase my setup and some thoughts.

Dwm - a Dynamic Window Manager

Dwm, like all of suckless software, has no configuration files or options. Everything is hard-coded into the source code. To customize dwm, you need to modify the source code and compile it yourself. There are no binary releases at all.

This process of modifying the source code might be intimidating, but due to the community around suckless software there are countless patches available for different needs. Here is a list of patches I’m currently using for dwm:

As you can see, I have quite a list of extra patches applied to dwm, increasing the lines of code from around 2000 to 2700. I see many of these patches as almost necessary, such as the full screen patch or the stacker patch.

Dwmblocks - a Status Bar for Dwm

Dwmblocks is a modular status bar for dwm. It is not made by suckless, but it follows the same spirit of suckless software by being source based and only 200 lines of code.

“Blocks” are shell scripts that output some information. You can then define how often or what signal is needed to run the script. For example, I have this script for my clock that runs every 30 seconds outputting the date and time. Clicking the clock opens a terminal with calcurse.

#!/bin/sh

case $BUTTON in
    1) setsid -f $TERMINAL -e calcurse ;;
esac
date "+ %Y %b %d (%a), %-I:%M%p"

Dmenu - a Dynamic Menu

Dmenu is a dynamic menu which allows you to create different prompts. By default, dmenu has a basic run prompt to launch applications.

I have also made a few scripts utilizing dmenu such as dman, which allows you to mount/unmount devices, and killprocess, which allows you to easily kill unresponsive programs.

Another useful dmenu script I found is passmenu. Passmenu allows you to get your passwords from Pass (The Standard UNIX Password Manager). I have made a separate blog post about Pass here.

I also have applied a couple of dmenu patches:

St - a Simple Terminal

You’d think finding a good terminal emulator that is fast and simple would be easy. I have tried xterm, urxvt, alacritty, kitty and so on, but they either lack basic features or are too slow and complicated for no reason. However, st is a simple terminal emulator for X that works great with a few extra patches.

The patches I have applied are:

Afterword

At first, I was hesitant to use suckless software because it is source based which made it seem intimidating. But the initial learning curve was worth it. Now I have my own custom builds of these programs and everything works great. I will keep this post updated if I face any problems, or I make further changes. So far I’m more than pleased.