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Sawfish is a highly customizable window manager. Formerly it has been the standard Window manager of the GNOME desktop, but because of a change of maintainership this is no longer true. This article will show you how to install and configure it for standalone use (without GNOME).

## Installation

Install the sawfishAUR package.

## Starting

Start `sawfish` with xinit.

## Customization

Out-of-the box Sawfish provides a menu accessible by clicking Mouse-2 (middle button) on the root window. From there, you can launch the customization app.

If you change any settings, they are stored in `~/.sawfish/custom`.

### Themes

You can select a window theme from the customization app. There is a small bug: if the theme is parametrizable, its configuration window will only appear after you restart the customization app.

#### Adding new

Create the directory `~/.sawfish/themes/` and drop there any theme files. You do not need to uncompress them. There are 500+ themes to choose from in the Sawfish site.

### Menus

Arch does not provide an automatic menu generator for Sawfish, but you can generate the menus using the XFCE4 ones. Here are the necessary steps:

Create the directory `~/.sawfish/lisp/`. This is where custom Sawfish scripts are stored; the menu will be one of them. Install libxslt, copy the xslt stylesheet example, paste it into a file named `xfce4-menu-to-sawfish.xslt`. Now you need a XFCE4 menu. You may have one already or you can generate one with menumaker or xdg_menu.

- If want to use menumaker:

    $ mmaker -c xfce4 | xsltproc xfce4-menu-to-sawfish.xslt - > ~/.sawfish/lisp/arch-menu.jl

- If you want to use archlinux-xdg-menu:

    $ xdg_menu --format xfce4 --root-menu /etc/xdg/menus/arch-applications.menu | xsltproc xfce4-menu-to-sawfish.xslt - > ~/.sawfish/lisp/arch-menu.jl

Now you have a script `~/.sawfish/lisp/arch-menu.jl` that defines a variable arch-menu with a list of your applications. You need to link to it from the root menu. You need to write the code for that to happen in `~/.sawfishrc`. So, start your favorite editor, create `~/.sawfishrc`, and type:

    ;;; sawfish configuration file
    ; 1. Load defaults
    (require 'sawfish-defaults)
    ; 2. Load autogenerated arch-menu
    (require 'arch-menu)
    ; 3. Replace Sawfish's apps-menu with ours
    (setq apps-menu arch-menu)

Restart Sawfish to effect the changes.

#### Menu example

    xfce4-menu-to-sawfish.xslt

    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
    <xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
                    xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
      <xsl:output method="text"/>
      <xsl:strip-space elements="*"/>
      <xsl:param name="terminal">urxvt</xsl:param>
      <xsl:template name="indent">
        <xsl:text>
    </xsl:text>
        <xsl:for-each select="ancestor-or-self::*">
          <xsl:text>  </xsl:text>
        </xsl:for-each>
      </xsl:template>
      <xsl:template match="/">
        <xsl:text>;;; Arch applications menu for Sawfish, generated from xfce4 menu
    (defvar arch-menu nil)
    (setq arch-menu '(</xsl:text>
        <xsl:apply-templates/>
        <xsl:text>))
    </xsl:text>
      </xsl:template>
      <xsl:template match="menu[.//app]">
        <xsl:call-template name="indent"/>
        <xsl:text>("</xsl:text>
        <xsl:value-of select="@name"/>
        <xsl:text>"</xsl:text>
        <xsl:apply-templates/>
        <xsl:text>)</xsl:text>
      </xsl:template>
      <xsl:template match="app">
        <xsl:call-template name="indent"/>
        <xsl:text>("</xsl:text>
        <xsl:value-of select="@name"/>
        <xsl:text>" (system "</xsl:text>
        <xsl:if test="@term='true'">
          <xsl:copy-of select="$terminal"/>
          <xsl:text> -e </xsl:text>
        </xsl:if>
        <xsl:value-of select="@cmd"/>
        <xsl:text> &"))</xsl:text>
      </xsl:template>
    </xsl:stylesheet>

## Additional resources

- Sawfish wiki - Official website

Category:

- Dynamic window managers