One thing I’ve always found cumbersome about configuring a tiling window manager is dealing with all the extra programs you need to launch on startup. Most WMs have a config setting for running one-off commands to start your status bar, set your background, and so on. This feels like an afterthought and is a pain to debug when one of those programs inevitably crashes. The solution? systemd. I was browsing the documentation for niri the other day and noticed this handy page.

In spring of 2021 I migrated my laptop configuration over to NixOS, a stateless Linux distribution backed by the purely functional package manager, Nix. My configuration is split between two repositories: a base NixOS config that contains all of my core utilities, and my home-manager configuration, which has all the graphical tools, scripts, and quality-of-life tweaks that I rely on day-to-day. Note: These two repos are loosely coupled, as my dwm build (which is included in the main configuration) has bindings for several of the scripts and programs that are bundled in my home-manager config.

My personal fork of Suckless’ dynamic window manager. It contains a whole bunch of extra layouts (fibbonacci, monocle, etc.), a rich set of vim-inspired bindings, and a now-playing readout for mpd (instead of the usual window title display).