Foo Window Manager

Minimal IPC/DSL-based Zooming Wm

Foo Wm was an idealistic & minimalistic wm for X11 which I built over the course of a summer while doing Hacker School. The architecture of the wm was simple, involving only two components:

• A tree data structure to hold windows and
• A DSL to manipulate & traverse the window tree

In foo-wm 'tiling' and 'floating' modals of organization familiar in WIMP were just setting values of containers. 'Workspaces' were just the immediate containers of the root node. And 'full-screening' a window meant simply issuing a zoom DSL command with a high positive delta.

The Foo DSL, accessible via a socket, was the only way to interact with foo-wm itself. In fact, foo-wm didn't even provide a way to bind keys to wm actions, because xbindkeys could and still can do that anyway.

All commands in the Foo DSL operated on two pointer nodes within the tree. The active node controlled the node currently through-putting mouse and keyboard events; and the view node represented the node that the screen was currently displaying. The full DSL was as follows:

Command	Targets Node	Purpose
zoom	view node	Zooms screen through tree.
containerize	focus node	Wraps current node in a new parent node.
focus	focus node	Moves focus pointer to brother in focus node's parent.
shift	focus node	Moves focus node's parent position relative to its parent.
kill	focus node	Removes focus node window from tree.
mark	view node	Sets a bookmark on the current viewnode.
jump	view node	Restores a bookmark of viewnode set with mark.

After building foo-wm I used it for about a year on and off. Being my first major serious C project; I learned to about malloc, free, and memset the hard way -- watching my windows crash and burn.

I've since stopped using foo-wm because I was too lazy to implement full EWMH window hinting, which substantially limited the number of applications I could use within foo-wm without annoyance.

When I go to build my next wm I'll likely scrap foo-wm and take a completely different approach¹ to a meta-wm/DSL-based-wm altogether.

While Foo Wm may be dead, it spirit lives on in some form. The 0.1 release of Bspwm, a popular tree-based wm within the Arch community, was influenced in part from the server/client architecture that I built into foo-wm².