Category Archives: stumpwm

StumpWM on Debian Wheezy

Everyone that’s ever talked to me about software development knows
that I am in love with Emacs. Emacs has a wonderful keyboard driven
interface and is almost infinitely customizable via Emacs Lisp. I’ve
done a lot of programming in Emacs from my not-so-great laptop
lately. My laptop has a rather poor 1280×800 resolution and low
performing integrated graphics chip. Until today, I was running the
GNOME 3 desktop environment on it. Unlike most people (or perhaps just
a loud minority), I like GNOME 3. However, I wanted something that was
both less graphics intensive and more keyboard driven than GNOME
Shell and Mutter.

Someone on IRC told me about StumpWM, a window manager written
entirely in Common Lisp. I had heard of StumpWM before, but back then
I wasn’t an Emacs user and I’ve never really stuck with any tiling
window manager that I’ve tried (DWM, Awesome). Now that I know the
power of a fully programmable environment thanks to Emacs, I decided
to give StumpWM a try. After some initial pains trying to get it to
run, I am now using it very happily.

Here is what I had to do to get StumpWM running on Debian Wheezy.

  1. Install StumpWM

    sudo apt-get install stumpwm

  2. Create an .xinitrc file in my home directory with the following
    text

    exec stumpwm

  3. Workaround clisp "component not found" errors

    I could not get StumpWM to start until I created the following
    symbolic links:

    ln -s /usr/share/common-lisp/source/stumpwm/stumpwm.asd /usr/share/common-lisp/systems/stumpwm.asd
ln -s /usr/share/common-lisp/source/cl-ppcre/cl-ppcre.asd /usr/share/common-lisp/systems/cl-ppcre.asd

  4. Start the X server

    startx

I use the GNOME Desktop Manager, so I also created a session file for
StumpWM in /usr/share/xsessions/stumpwm.desktop.

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=StumpWM
Comment=This session logs you into StumpWM
Exec=stumpwm
TryExec=stumpwm
Icon=
Type=Application

I hope this brief installation guide can be of use to one of you out
there in Internet land. Perhaps in the future I will write an article
about customizing StumpWM with Common Lisp.

From the blog dthompson by David Thompson and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.