dwl — personal build

A personal configuration of dwl, a compact Wayland compositor based on wlroots, following the suckless philosophy.

Patches

Listed by size:

Dependencies

Build dependencies:

• wlroots 0.19
• wayland-protocols
• pixman
• fcft
• tllist
• libdbus

Runtime:

• aslstatus — status bar feed
• uwsm — session manager
• foot — terminal emulator (server mode)
• mew — application launcher
• wbg — wallpaper
• mako — notification daemon
• kanshi — display configuration
• grim + slurp — screenshots
• wl-copy — clipboard
• brightnessctl — backlight control
• wpctl (wireplumber/pipewire) — audio control
• swaylock — screen locker
• firefox, discord, thunderbird, AyuGram, steam, qbittorrent — applications with tag rules

Building

make clean && make
sudo make install

Configuration is done in config.h. The build system creates it automatically from config.def.h on first run. To customize:

cp config.def.h config.h
# edit config.h
make clean && make

Running

With uwsm (recommended)

uwsm provides proper systemd session integration — environment propagation, graphical-session.target lifecycle, and clean shutdown.

1. Create the wrapper script at ~/.local/bin/dwl-aslstatus:

#!/bin/sh
aslstatus | dwl

chmod +x ~/.local/bin/dwl-aslstatus

The script exists solely to pipe aslstatus into dwl's stdin before the process starts. This cannot be done from the autostart array since dwl's stdin is fixed at launch time.

2. Create a session entry at /usr/local/share/wayland-sessions/dwl-aslstatus.desktop:

[Desktop Entry]
Name=dwl (aslstatus)
Comment=dwm for Wayland with aslstatus
Exec=dwl-aslstatus
Type=Application

Don't edit the dwl.desktop installed by make install — it will be overwritten on reinstall. The separate file also lets you choose between a bare dwl session and this one from the display manager login screen.

3. Choose your launch path:

TTY login — add to ~/.profile:

if uwsm check may-start; then
 exec uwsm start dwl-aslstatus.desktop
fi

Display manager — simply select "dwl (aslstatus)" from the session list at login.

Session startup sequence

On launch, autostart[] in config.h runs after dwl initializes:

static const char *const autostart[] = {
 "uwsm", "finalize", NULL, /* propagates WAYLAND_DISPLAY into systemd/dbus */
 "wbg", "/path/to/wallpaper", NULL,
 "mako", NULL,
 "kanshi", NULL,
 "foot", "--server", NULL, /* foot server for fast terminal spawning */
 NULL
};

uwsm finalize must be first — it exports WAYLAND_DISPLAY into the activation environment, which is required for screen sharing and any app launched as a systemd service.

Key configuration

Keybindings

Screenshots are saved to ~/pix/ss/ with a timestamp filename and copied to clipboard. Notifications are sent via mako.

License

Inherits licenses from dwl, dwm, tinywl, and sway. See LICENSE* files for details.