2bwm – the WM with lowest RAM usage?

[Member eugen-b]

I don’t know whether it really is the WM with lowest RAM usage, but ps_mem tells it is about 600 KB total memory on my machine with 8GB RAM.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/2bwm
https://github.com/venam/2bwm
It’s a stacking WM which can be easily tiled with keybindings.
It’s a WM without text config files, you set it up in config.h before you compile it and if you want to change it you need to recompile it.
I haven’t tried it on antiX or another Debian based distro, but I built it on archlinux32 for instance using the AUR package and modifying PKGBUILD.
Because if I don’t modify it the default config.h of 2bwm is being used and it has none of the important commands defined like terminal, command launcher.
I use this config.h from here https://gist.github.com/nerd/01cb6a2dd5864706e8c51d16ebdfecf7 and modify it (dmenu instead of rofi, st instead of urxvt).
My modification to the PKGBUILD was to copy the custom config.h to the src directory before starting make. But if you build it from git directly you can do it like this:

git clone git://github.com/venam/2bwm.git
cp config.h 2bwm/
cd 2bwm
make
sudo make install

[Member manyroads]

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Respekt, mein Freund.

Pax vobiscum,
Mark Rabideau - http://many-roads.com
"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." H. L. Mencken
dwm & i3wm ~Reg. Linux User #449130
20 Jan 2021 ~ "End of an Error"

[Member ex_Koo]

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Interesting concept I see that Luke Smith has a vim script that after you edit the config.h file and save, it automatically recomplies the source code. That would be so handy.
Don’t no how many times I have edited suckless source and da changers have not happened opps forgot to recompile again.

[Member eugen-b]

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I hope I can get used to a particular setup and won’t need to recompile it too often. That’s why I chose not to use an additional script. But if you deal with many config.h files a script or a similar helper will be helpful, indeed.

[Member ex_Koo]

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Luke talks about the vim key in this video. 3.50min >

vim key auto compile

Here is a link to Lukes gitlab

gitlab

[Member manyroads]

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So I guess that means dwm is not really the best desktop for ‘currency’. 😉

Pax vobiscum,
Mark Rabideau - http://many-roads.com
"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." H. L. Mencken
dwm & i3wm ~Reg. Linux User #449130
20 Jan 2021 ~ "End of an Error"

[Member eugen-b]

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dwm is definitely much more mature, 2bwm is more barebone, but it will probably change. It looks like the developer plans to enable a text config file in the future. https://github.com/venam/2bwm#text-based-config-file

[Member manyroads]

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spectrwm might be something ‘in the middle’. I may play with it some. I tried it once a while ago and it was pretty easy to get operational. But I did not try it seriously.
https://github.com/conformal/spectrwm

Edit: Here is someone who has done a nice job with it… https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/7u17gq/spectrwm_sunset/

• This reply was modified 3 years, 9 months ago by manyroads.
• This reply was modified 3 years, 9 months ago by manyroads.

Pax vobiscum,
Mark Rabideau - http://many-roads.com
"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." H. L. Mencken
dwm & i3wm ~Reg. Linux User #449130
20 Jan 2021 ~ "End of an Error"

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