FrankenWM - ArchWiki

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From FrankenWM:

FrankenWM is a dynamic tiling window manager (comparable to dwm or Awesome), featuring the v-stack, b-stack, grid, fibonacci, dualstack, equal and monocle layouts out of the box. If you want to, you can add gaps between the windows as well.

## Installation

The factual accuracy of this article or section is disputed.

Reason: AUR package already exists which appears to be fully compliant, therefore there should be no need for the manual installation guide within the Arch Wiki. (Discuss in Talk:FrankenWM)

Install one of the following packages:

- frankenwmAUR - Latest release.
- frankenwm-gitAUR - Latest commit to master.

Tip: You can also install directly from GitHub.

## Starting

### From tty

Run `frankenwm` with xinit

## Configuration

Configuration is done at compile time by editing `config.h`. There are lots of comments in the default configuration (`config.def.h`) which explain what the settings are doing.

Note: For configuration changes to take place you must supply `config.h` within #Installation and rebuild and reinstall the package.

## Usage

The basic usage includes opening a terminal (`Meta+Enter`), opening dmenu (`Meta+r`) and closing windows (`Meta+c`). There is a complete, sorted list of the default keybinds and explanations of the tiling layouts in frankenwm(1).

### Panels

FrankenWM does not come with a panel included, but gives you the possibility to leave space either at the top or bottom for one, like conky or dzen. There are a couple of settings in the configuration for this space.

If you want to use FrankenWM's status in your bar, you can pipe FrankenWM to a shell script to parse the output and pipe it to a bar. Sample scripts to accomplish this with a few different bar are located here.

## Troubleshooting

### I do not see anything

This is normal behaviour, as FrankenWM does not come with a bar included or a desktop background, so after running `frankenwm` without anything else, you will probably see a black screen. See Panels above for information on how to add a panel to your desktop. Wallpapers can be set by using software like xsetroot, feh or hsetroot.

### I cannot open a terminal/menu

Have a look at the `config.h` used to build your currently running version of FrankenWM, which is located in the build directory. Make sure that both the shortcut to run the `termcmd`/`menucmd` command and the `termcmd`/`menucmd` itself are set properly to start an installed terminal/menu.

Category:

- Dynamic window managers

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