NAME

dwl —

dwm for Wayland

SYNOPSIS

dwl [-s command]

DESCRIPTION

dwl is a Wayland compositor based on wlroots. It is intended to fill the same space in the Wayland world that dwm does for X11.

When given the -s option, dwl starts a shell process running command when starting. When stopping, it sends SIGTERM to the child process and waits for it to exit.

Users are encouraged to customize dwl by editing the sources, in particular config.h. The default key bindings are as follows:

Mod-[1-9]: Show only all windows with a tag.
Mod-Ctrl-[1-9]: Show all windows with a tag.
Mod-Shift-[1-9]: Move window to a single tag.
Mod-Ctrl-Shift-[1-9]: Toggle tag for window.
Mod-p: Spawn bemenu-run.
Mod-Shift-Return: Spawn alacritty.
Mod-[jk]: Move focus down/up the stack.
Mod-[id]: Increase/decrease number of windows in master area.
Mod-[hl]: Decrease/increase master area.
Mod-Return: Move window on top of stack or switch top of stack with second window.
Mod-Tab: Show only all windows with previous tag.
Mod-Shift-c: Close window.
Mod-t: Switch to tabbed layout.
Mod-f: Switch to floating layout.
Mod-m: Switch to monocle layout.
Mod-Space: Switch to previous layout.
Mod-Shift-Space: Toggle floating state of window.
Mod-e: Toggle fullscreen state of window.
Mod-0: Show all windows.
Mod-Shift-0: Set all tags for window.
Mod-,: Move focus to previous monitor.
Mod-.: Move focus to next monitor.
Mod-Shift-,: Move window to previous monitor.
Mod-Shift-.: Move window to next monitor.
Mod-Shift-q: Quit dwl.

These might differ depending on your keyboard layout.

ENVIRONMENT

These environment variables are used by dwl:

XDG_RUNTIME_DIR: A directory where temporary user files, such as the Wayland socket, are stored.
XDG_CONFIG_DIR: A directory containung configuration of various programs and libraries, including libxkbcommon.
DISPLAY, WAYLAND_DISPLAY, WAYLAND_SOCKET: Tell how to connect to an underlying X11 or Wayland server.
WLR_*: Various variables specific to wlroots.
XKB_*, XLOCALEDIR, XCOMPOSEFILE: Various variables specific to libxkbcommon.
XCURSOR_PATH: List of directories to search for XCursor themes in.
HOME: A directory where there are always dear files there for you. Waiting for you to clean them up.

These are set by dwl:

WAYLAND_DISPLAY: Tell how to connect to dwl.
DISPLAY: If using Xwayland, tell how to connect to the Xwayland server.

EXAMPLES

Start dwl with s6 in the background:

dwl -s 's6-svscan
  <&-'

CAVEATS

The child process's standard input is connected with a pipe to dwl. If the child process neither reads from the pipe nor closes its standard input, dwl will freeze after a while due to it blocking when writing to the full pipe buffer.

BUGS

All of them.