StumpWM is a manual tiling window manager written in Common Lisp, with an interaction paradigm inspired by GNU Screen and Emacs. Stump has a minimal feature set, with support for dual monitors, multiple window groups (i.e. virtual desktops,) and full keyboard driven interaction, and has many opportunities for extension. Although there is minimal current development, the software is stable, has wide use, and is very extensible.
The default StumpWM configuration is operable, however there are no default configurations distributed with StumpWM to provide a “base configuration” for hacking, customization, and practical use. This “StumpWM stack” provides such an example derived from an actual day-to-day StumpWM configuration. In turn, this document, provides an outline of the stack, and its configuration and use.
The latest release is always available at http://download.cyborginstitute.net/stumpwm-config.tar.gz.
You can always view past archival releases by visiting http://download.cyborginstitute.net/, where releases reflect the full commit hash of the stack project git repository (github).
Please submit an issue to the mailing list if you’d would like to see a more formal release process or numbering system.
To use this StumpWM configuration you must:
From here, you can continue to develop and tweak the configuration, and offer your own fork or variant, or submit patches/merge (pull) requests to the listserv!
The distribution of this StumpWM config comes with the following components:
A makefile which contains a default message for “installing” and setting up the StumpWM configuration.
This process is non-destructive, and will not delete your current StumpWM configuration (if you have one.) Rather, it will move an existing ~/.stumpwmrc file to a ~/stumpwmrc- file with a timestamp appended.
A stumpwm directory that holds this StumpWM configuration. This includes components from the contrib directory of StumpWM, as well as some semi-custom configuration. Within this directory there are the following components:
config/ this is where the site-specific or host-specific configuration goes. If you have any configuration that you need that depends on the host, or are using the same basic configuration on a number of hosts but have limited per-machine differences, store that configuration here.
To be fair, you could write Lisp code to implement different configuration subsets based on environment information; however, this is difficult to use and track if you have to add and possibly remove hosts regularly/ever it might become confusing and hard to maintain.
tycho- files inside of the stumpwm/ configuration, contain lisp which is mostly unique to this configuration. These files are where all of the “interesting” things happen:
Other lisp files, typically derived from the StumpWM contrib folder.
To use:
Install StumpWM and all of its dependencies. Whatever method you use to install these software packages should be sufficient. The most common configuration for StumpWM is to use: the sbcl lisp system, the latest clx version (i.e. from git,) and a compiled/installed version of itself StumpWM from git. There are packages for this on Arch Linux. Other distributions, and quicklisp should be functional for this task, but have not been tested.
Download the distribution, into your home directory. The command will resemble:
cd
wget http://download.cyborginstitute.net/stumpwm-config-latest.tar.gz
Extract the archive:
tar -zxvf stumpwm-config-latest.tar.gz
Build the “configure” target.
cd ~/stumpwm
make configure
Inspect the content of the ~/stumpwm-config/stump directory. Confirm that the configured stumpwm instance is suitable.
Build the “install” target. This will rename and timestamp your current .stumpwmrc file and create a new .stumpwmrc that is a symbolic link which points to ~/stumpwm/config/[hostname].lisp, that replaces [hostname] with the hostname of your machine.
make install
Restart StumpWM with the new config.
Continue to tweak the lisp files in and ~/stumpwm as well as [hostname].lisp as needed. In general, place all machine-specific configuration in [hostname].lisp, and general configuration in the tycho- or other files in the ~/stumpwm directory.