Experiencing Stumpwm

What Emacs is to editors, Stumpwm is to window managers.
--Bill Clementson (link)

Introduction

Recently I switched from GNOME to Stumpwm (wiki), which means that I jumped out of a desktop environment to a simple window manager. So far, I'm very satisfied with such a change and never looked back. Stumpwm, as its website says, is a tiling, keyboard driven X11 Window Manager written entirely in Common Lisp. This definition summarizes the reasons why Stumpwm is so suitable for me.

First, Stumpwm is a tiling, keyboard driven window manager. This is very useful to boost productivity. When working, it is desirable to minimize context switching. Tilting combined with keyboard driven enables working with several applications simultaneously as if your are dealing with one single program. Let me give an example. As described in previous post, with Emacs as development environment, it is easy to fire up one browser within Emacs itself to preview blog post. However it is painful to switch between Emacs and browser. Before using Stumpwm, I am considering ways to integrate Emacs and Firefox together. With Stumpwm, such dream is just trivial to fulfill: one can show Emacs and browser side by side, with a few keystrokes to switch between them. Everytime you make changes in Emacs and request the results to be shown in Firefox, they are shown simultaneously. No more need to leave your hand for mouse to click back and forth between Emacs and Firefox. This gives you the feeling of integrated environment. Note that I just use Emacs and Firefox as an example, and such convenience is applicable for every application. Currently, the problem is that I'm so accustomed to Stumpwm keystrokes that I somehow confused the keystrokes of switching between windows in Stumpwm and Emacs!

Second, Stumpwm is written in Common Lisp. which means that you can build Stumpwm with your favorite CL implementation and you have a Lisp runtime when you work under Stumpwm. A powerful programming language is just embedded within your window manager and you can invoke it at any time. The other benefit is that you can configure your window manager as you like, even when it is running!

You may get a feeling on how Stumpwm works by watching this nice video.

Installation

Given the above lengthy introduction of Stumpwm, you may wonder how to install this gem. Here we assume that you have some knowledge about Common Lisp. Basically, installing Stumpwm is to compile it with your preferred CL implementation, and tell your system to run Stumpwm as your window manager.

Installing Stumpwm on Gentoo Linux is straightforward. Throughout this section, we will assume that SBCL is the CL implementation. Stumpwm website suggests turn off threading support in SBCL (disable USE flag threads) for better performance. To install, simply type emerge stumpwm. Note that at the time of writing, there is also an ebuild called stumpwm-cvs. Simply ignore it since it is actually a very old version, not the bleeding edge version suggested by its name. Advanced users might consider to get git version for latest cool features.

There are mainly two ways to invoke Stumpwm. One is to run it by calling SBCL, the other is to dump a core image containing Stumpwm within SBCL and invoke that image. We will take the latter approach. To proceed, first start SBCL by typing sbcl. Next issue the following in REPL sequentially:

(asdf:oos 'asdf:load-op :stumpwm)
(sb-ext:save-lisp-and-die "stumpwm" :executable t
                          :toplevel #'(lambda () (stumpwm:stumpwm ":0")))

Next, put the generated executable stumpwm somewhere in PATH (I put it under /usr/local/bin). Since I always start X Window by typing startx, following command is used to use Stumpwm as my window manager:

$ echo "exec stumpwm" >> ~/.xinitrc

Using Stumpwm

Configuration

All stumpwm configurations are stored in file ~/.stumpwmrc, which is written in Common Lisp. Just like .emacs, this file allows you to fully customize Stumpwm. Following is my current configuration:

;;;; -*- Mode: Lisp -*-

(in-package :stumpwm)

;; Load swank.
(load "/usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/slime/swank-loader.lisp")
(swank-loader:init)
(define-stumpwm-command "swank" ()
  (setf stumpwm:*top-level-error-action* :break)
  (swank:create-server :port 4005
                       :style swank:*communication-style*
                       :dont-close t)
  (echo-string (current-screen) "Starting swank."))
(define-key *root-map* (kbd "C-s") "swank")       

;; Customize bars and modeline.
(setf *message-window-gravity* :center)
(setf *input-window-gravity* :center)
;; Turn on mode line.
(toggle-mode-line (current-screen) (current-head))
(setf *screen-mode-line-format* 
      (list "%w | "
            '(:eval (run-shell-command "date | tr -d '[:cntrl:]'" t))))

(set-prefix-key (kbd "C-i"))
(define-key *root-map* (kbd "c") 
  "exec urxvt +sb -fn \"xft:Bitstream Vera Sans Mono:pixelsize=20\"")

(define-stumpwm-command "firefox" ()
  "Run or switch to firefox."
  (run-or-raise "firefox" '(:class "Firefox")))
(define-key *root-map* (kbd "f") "firefox")

Some explanations of my configuration:

• Prefix key: I use C-i instead of default C-t. The reason is that C-t is used in Firefox to open a new tab and also in Emacs for transpose. Then why choose C-i? I'd like to admit that it is quite difficult to select a prefix key for Emacs user. Before settle down on C-i, I fired up Emacs to see whether there is any key binding C-x where x from a to z is not used by Emacs. Unfortunately (fortunately?), Emacs binds every combination. So I can only choose one prefix key which is easy to type and I uses infrequently in Emacs. Then C-i is selected. Note that you can send C-i to application like Emacs by typing C-i i. For the following sections, please replace C-i with your favorite prefix key.
• SLIME: the section staring with comments Load swank provides ways to load swank. Type C-i C-s to start swank. To connect to swank, simply run Emacs, and type slime-connect within Emacs, and type RET and RET to accept default host (127.0.0.1) and default port (4005). Then you can play with Stumpwm as you wish: change parameters, add your own functions etc. Note that I do not start swank automatically for security reasons.
• Key bindings: I use C-i c to start console: urxvt instead of xterm. Note that I have also set the font for urxvt. In addition I have setup using C-i f to start Firefox in case Firefox is not started, or bring Firefox window to front if it is already running.

Key Bindings

Following is a list of key bindings I used frequently. For simplicity, I have omitted the prefix key.

• ?: Stumpwm help
• ;: Run Stumpwm commands
• :: Send commands to Common Lisp interpreter.
• Space: Go to next window
• c: Run X terminal
• e: Run Emacs or raise it if it is already running
• f: Run Firefox or raise it if it is already running
• k: Kill current window
• g c: Create a new group
• g k: Kill current group
• g m: Move current window to a specified group
• g Space: Next group
• o: Focus shifts to next frame
• Q: Remove all splits
• s: Vertical split
• S: Horizontal split