Re: [dev] [dwm] "reload" configuration?

On Fri, 25 Mar 2011, Anselm R Garbe wrote:

> On 25 March 2011 12:46, Benjamin R. Haskell wrote:
>> So, in the early stages of trying out dwm, the thing I'm finding most
>> frustrating is the need to restart after changing config.h.
>>
>> My first attempt was to modify spawn such that if arg->v[0] is "dwm",
>> it doesn't fork, just exec's.  But, when doing that, all the windows'
>> tag information is lost, so I end up with 50 windows jumbled onto tag
>> 1 on one monitor.
>>
>> Anyone have suggestions?
>
> Just launch dwm from a while loop in .xinitrc (or launch dwm manually
> from an xterm as WM):
>
> while true
> do
> dwm
> done
>

[OT] Where did everyone pick up this shell scripting style with the
extra newline? ("while x\ndo\n" instead of "while x ; do\n"?)

I omitted too many details. One reason I don't do that is that it's not
just "dwm" that I'm doing this for. I'm migrating (possibly/probably)
from wmii, so I'd also like to be able to respawn into wmii (or ion3 or
...). I modified spawn() to handle any of those cases by not forking.

But beyond that, looping or manually launching dwm doesn't solve the
problem that all the tag information is lost between restarts. wmii
gets around it by dumping the tag information into X props (still loses
layout info, but keeping the tags is far better than dumping everything
onto a single tag). Has anyone patched dwm to do something similar?

-- 
Best,
Ben