[SOLVED] dwm sometimes stuck in impossible window layout

jr_bob_dobbs · 01-29-2019, 03:25 PM

I was giving dwm a try. Fetched it fine. Set the options and compiled it fine. Was able to run it. Applied a patch to get sys tray without mishap. There is just one odd problem.

Randomly the layout will go go from:

Code:

+-----------------+-------+
|                 |       |
|                 |       |
|                 +-------|
|                 |       |
|                 |       |
|                 +-------|
|                 |       |
+-----------------+-------+

to:

Code:

+-------------------------+
|                         |
+-------------------------+
|                         |
+-------------------------+
|                         |
+-------------------------+
|                         |
+-------------------------+

Once this happens, it is stuck in that layout until I exit dwm.

Has anyone else gotten this to occur? If so, were you able to fix it?

sevendogsbsd · 01-29-2019, 03:30 PM

I've had this happen and I believe I thought I had put it in the wrong mode but the docs (https://dwm.suckless.org/tutorial/) don't say anything about this. I believe I also had to exit and come back. I have since stopped using DWM but not for that reason. I want to say it only did that to me once - it certainly was not something that happened all the time.

FlinchX · 02-02-2019, 12:59 PM

You're not mentioning which dwm version, one can assume it's 6.1. ALso, do you mean the dwm-6.1-systray.diff patch from here https://dwm.suckless.org/patches/systray/ ? If positive, is it the only patch you've applied?

I am using this setup (and a couple of other patches) and I've never experienced the bug you're describing. I'm pretty clueless about the inner machinery of dwm, but if I were you and I succeeded to reproduce the bug with vanilla dwm and the systray patch only on top of it, I would probably email the authors of the patch directly.

jr_bob_dobbs · 02-04-2019, 08:33 PM

Well, after some time away, and then some trial and error, I found out how to cause the problem to manifest. It seems that mod-i and mod-d (where in my case, mod is the win key) were how I did it.

The problem was caused by my lack of understanding of what those two key combinations do.

mod-i Increments and mod-d Decrement the number of windows that can be in the Master area at the same time. This is initially one. Increasing it to two is often useful and one sees that in many screen shots of dwm.

What I had been doing was hitting mod-d while there was still only one window in the Master area. This resulted in ZERO windows in the Master area, causing the "stack" (non-master) windows to expand to the full width of the screen in an oddball layout. So, not a bug: dwm acting as intended.

FlinchX · 02-04-2019, 09:29 PM

If you find yourself accidentally hitting some key combos, it really helps commenting them out in the config file and recompiling.