Textbook of Linux

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bspwm

A tiling window manager that arranges windows as a binary tree.

bspwm represents the desktop as a binary space-partitioning tree: each node is either a window or a split (horizontal or vertical) of two child nodes. Manipulating windows means manipulating the tree — splitting a node, rotating a subtree, moving a window to another monitor, transposing two windows. The single bspc command exposes this entire tree to scripts.

bspwm itself does not bind keys; users typically pair it with sxhkd, the simple X hotkey daemon by the same author, which exists specifically to issue bspc commands in response to key presses. The split between window-manager and key-binding daemon is unusually clean and has been imitated by a number of newer window managers.

Bastien Dejean started bspwm in 2012. It has a small but loyal community of users, especially those who prefer fully-tilable window-manager workflows but find dwm too low-level and i3 too opinionated about layout. Configuration is by editing a small shell script that runs at startup and issues bspc commands.

Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install bspwm
Fedora/RHEL:   sudo dnf install bspwm
Arch:          sudo pacman -S bspwm