komorebi/README.md

komorebi

Tiling Window Management for Windows.

About

komorebi is a tiling window manager that works as an extension to Microsoft's Desktop Window Manager in Windows 10 and above.

komorebi allows you to control application windows, virtual workspaces and display monitors with a CLI which can be used with third-party software such as AutoHotKey to set user-defined keyboard shortcuts.

Description

komorebi only responds to WinEvents and the messages it receives on a dedicated socket.

komorebic is a CLI that writes messages on komorebi's socket.

komorebi doesn't handle any keyboard or mouse inputs; a third party program (e.g. AutoHotKey) is needed in order to translate keyboard and mouse events to komorebic commands.

This architecture, popularised by bspwm on Linux and yabai on macOS, is outlined as follows:

     PROCESS                SOCKET
ahk  -------->  komorebic  <------>  komorebi

Design

komorebi is the successor to yatta and as such aims to build on the learnings from that project.

While yatta was primary an attempt to learn how to work with and call Windows APIs from Rust, while secondarily implementing a minimal viable tiling window manager for my own needs (largely single monitor, single workspace), komorebi has been redesigned from the ground-up to support more complex features that have become standard in tiling window managers on other platforms.

komorebi holds a list of physical monitors.

A monitor is just a rectangle of the available work area which contains one or more virtual workspaces.

A workspace holds a list of containers.

A container is just a rectangle where one or more application windows can be displayed.

This means that:

• Every monitor has its own collection of virtual workspaces
• Workspaces only know about containers and their dimensions, not about individual application windows
• Every application window must belong to a container, even if that container only contains one application window
• Many application windows can be stacked and cycled through in the same container within a workspace

Getting Started

This project is still heavily under development and there are no prebuilt binaries available yet.

If you would like to use komorebi, you will need a working Rust development environment on Windows 10. If you are using the x86_64-pc-windows-msvc toolchain, make sure you have also installed the Build Tools for Visual Studio 2019.

You can then clone this repo and compile the source code to install the binaries for komorebi and komorebic:

cargo install --path komorebi
cargo install --path komorebic

By running komorebic start at a Powershell prompt, you should see the following output:

Start-Process komorebi -WindowStyle hidden

This means that komorebi is now running in the background, tiling all your windows, and listening for commands sent to it by komorebic.

You can similarly stop the process by running komorebic stop.

Configuration

As previously mentioned, this project does not handle anything related to keybindings and shortcuts directly. I personally use AutoHotKey to manage my window management shortcuts, and have provided a sample komorebi.ahk AHK script that you can use as a starting point for your own.

Development

If you would like to contribute code to this repository, there are a few requests that I have to ensure a foundation of code quality, consistency and commit hygiene:

• Flatten all use statements except in bindings/build.rs
• Run cargo +nightly clippy and ensure that all lints and suggestions have been addressed before committing
• Run cargo +nightly fmt --all to ensure consistent formatting before committing
• Use git cz with the Commitizen CLI to prepare commit messages
• Provide at least one short sentence or paragraph in your commit message body to describe your thought process for the changes being committed