There was a patch for an older version of dwm https://dwm.suckless.org/patches/current_desktop/ , but I want to stick to vanilla dwm-6.1 and I'm looking for a way to find out the active tag from a script.

Is there any trivial keylogging software that could write something to a file everytime Alt-[1-9] is pressed?

Any other suggestions?

maybe it's possible to query dwm itself for the desired data, then update the root window properties accordingly?
for that, a small self-made daemon (just a shell script) would be enough.

does dwm 6.1 update the root window's properties at all? if so, how?

what exactly do you want to achieve?

fwiw, i don't think keylogging is the best approach here.
i also don't see any reason not to use this patch (it can be checked against the current version; maybe it doesn't even require any modification at all).

I have no clue how would I do that, I can't dig up the sources of dwm, I'm not even C literate to read past simplest hello world.

I have no clue about it. All I could do was to:

In the example above, for KEY in [1..9], after I hit Alt-KEY (I never switch tags/workspaces with the mouse, that's why I thought about keylogging), I want to run a script and get the numeric value of KEY so I can use it in a custom status bar.

I could do it with wmctrl for the older, patched dwm version, but like I said, rather prefer to use some ugly third party hack than step aside from vanilla dwm this time.

I never claimed it's the best approach. I even admit that the idea looks like a very ugly hack, but at least it could give me what I want in a reasonably painless way, assuming I can find some trivial keylogging software that I could set up to catch just Alt-[1-9] keypresses so it logs it to a file.


Main reason is that I want to stick to vanilla dwm, I don't want to resort to patches since I only need this very little thing that dwm doesn't seem to be able to do by default to make me happy. And as I mentioned above, I don't have the skills to verify the patch. Even if it would apply cleanly to 6.1 as source, I don't want to expose myself to the risk of hitting functional troubles later during usage of blindly modified software. Not to mention that if it would be a legit patch for 6.1, they could bother to update it in a few years since it was released for the older version.

i meant a running instance of dwm.
but come to think of it, i don't think dwm provides that sort of functionality.
its design concept is to be as unconfigurable and static and primitive as possible in its compiled form.
maybe you should be looking at existing custom status bars designed to work with dwm.

this doesn't make sense.
dwm is meant to be hacked.

it's a simple patch; you can see what it does (even i can see it and i don't know C at all), and it should be simple enough to check against current dwm.c.
i'll say it again: dwm is meant to be hacked - here's a quote from suckless.org:
i know, it's harsh. i don't like it either, but there it is.
i don't use dwm.

I settled for manually merging the current_desktop patch into dwm and recompiling. Seems to work

well done!