How to set up a Dev environment for your window manager

[ryoh]

 

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Xephyr

 

Before Reading this post I recommend watching the above video and wiki page. Here I only provide an example script of setting up a dev environment. 

#!/bin/sh
Xephyr -br -ac -noreset -screen 800x600 :1 &
DISPLAY=:1 awesome --config ./rc.lua &

  ls ./*.lua | entr kill -s SIGHUP $(ps | grep -Po '([0-9]*)(?=( p.*\.awesome))') &

 

Explanation:

first lines runs a Xephyr instance and creates a DISPLAY :1

next line starts the window manager using the config file in the current directory. 

next line uses entr to listen for changes to the file and send a SIGHUP signal to the window manager to reload the rc.lua.

 

also in case you need to kill everything running in the background of you pty

for string in `ps | cut -d ' ' -f 1`; do kill -s term $string; done

 

Result 

[cwade12c]

Beyond just running an X Window in a nested X Server, I think this is a really cool example of running Window Managers....from a Config File! I assume you have been playing around with Nix more and taking inspiration from that? This is very cool stuff.

Time to go play with Awesome