by Michael Skyba
(Initially written on 2021-08-15)
Recently, I found out about berry, which describes itself as “[a] healthy, byte-sized window manager”. As of the time I’m writing this, I have used berry for around one day. In this post, I would like to share my first impressions.
The main thing that drew me to berry in the first place was its philosophy. dwm, which I was using before trying berry, does not follow the UNIX philosophy as well as I would like. In particular, dwm ships with a statusbar and a hotkey daemon (the latter is not a precise description, but I’m not sure what would be a better name; if you use dwm, you know what I’m referring to). Neither of these is part of berry. Additionally, berry has no built-in tiling. Instead, you can use berryc to create your own layout.
If berry doesn’t come with its own statusbar, which one did I choose? On dwm, my
usage of its statusbar consisted of a cron job, running xsetroot -name
calls. This was enough for me. I didn’t need (and still don’t need) fancy
modules or anything like that.
With this in mind, I went with the statusbar that berry’s website recommended: lemonbar, which I am quite satisfied with. Lemonbar has all of the features I would want in a statusbar without going too far over.
The main annoyance is that, from what I understand, it is incompatible with fontconfig and TTF fonts. After realizing this, I installed lemonbar-xft, a fork with fonts working the way I would expect.
Another thing that caught me a bit off guard was the usage. I assumed you would
run bard or something similar and then call xsetroot as I was used to.
Instead, lemonbar uses standard input. For example, you could run echo test | lemonbar -p to set the bar to the word “test”. Here’s what I came up with for
replicating my xsetroot workflow:
# Init
rm -f $XDG_DATA_HOME/statusbar
touch $XDG_DATA_HOME/statusbar
tail -f $XDG_DATA_HOME/statusbar | lemonbar -g x25+0+0 -f "Noto Sans JP Medium" -p &
Then, inside cron, my battery script runs
echo "%{c}$(date)%{c}" >> $XDG_DATA_HOME/statusbar.
This isn’t literally how it works, because I don’t just want the date in
BusyBox’s default format, but you get the idea. The %{c}s are used to center
the text, which I prefer to dwm’s bar, where the placement is the right side of
the bar. (Yes, I know that there’s probably a way to change that, but it’s more
annoying than searching “center” in man lemonbar, especially since dwm’s bar
additionally shows the title of the window and draws workspaces, neither of
which I require.)
Now that I think about it, it’s probably easier to simply use killall lemonbar ; echo "%{c}$(date)%{c}" | lemonbar -p. I might give that a go later; it will
likely perform better than what I just described, the use of a “statusbar” file.
Another significant “change” a dwm user would experience is the new reliance on berryc, which is berry’s client.
First, berryc has “settings”, which I set in berry’s autostart file. I copied the default autostart (from the “examples” directory), my main change being that I removed all borders/window decorations.
Second, and more importantly, berryc gives you control over the management of windows. Instead of setting WM-related bindings in a config.h file, you need some kind of hotkey daemon that can map keys to berryc commands. I chose to use sxhkd, which I would say is one of my favourite projects of all time. sxhkd is such a pleasure to use that I even ported my bindings to fsignal when I was on dwm. As an example, here is my current configuration for berry. I have a separate, WM-agnostic configuration that includes everything else (e.g. launching my terminal, running dmenu scripts).
Now, seeing this simple config file, combined with the knowledge that berry has no built-in tiling, you may be wondering whether managing windows is a huge pain (compared to dwm). My personal answer is no. So far, this basic setup of Super+(h|l|Space) for tiling windows is enough, and I’ve yet to feel a sudden urge to switch back to dwm.
You should note that I was not a heavy user of “complicated” tiling on dwm. I mostly had a few windows in master-stack mode, occasionally popping into monocle mode. My workflow with berry feels just as convenient. If, however, you are frequently using something fancy (this, for example), you will need to write a few shell scripts to make berry act the way you like. This should be totally possible, though. See their website if you’re interested in doing so.
In this section, I will describe a few things that I’m unsatisfied with. I’m pretty much nitpicking, though, so none of this should be taken very seriously.
First, neither resizing nor moving windows using (Super|Alt)+Mouse is working for me. This should be taken with a mountain of salt, though, because I’m 99% sure that it’s my fault. When I first tried berry (with the example configuration), it was working fine. I’ll fiddle around with it later.
Second, I’m not a fan of their website. Its design does not look simple, which, from what I can see, sends the opposite message. Some examples of better-designed websites, in my opinion, are (the current states of): my website, KISS Linux’s website, and OpenBSD’s website.
Even besides the design, some of the information on the website is inaccurate.
For instance, on their “Usage” page, they wrote window_*_relative instead of
window_*_absolute. See the man page if something mentioned on their website
isn’t working the way you would expect.
Finally, judging from the GitHub issues, I can see that berry’s philosophy is not 100% aligned with mine. This is to be expected, of course; different people have different opinions, but still. For an example, see this issue. In my eyes, this should be left for the user to script, which would not be difficult at all. JLErvin doesn’t explicitly agree that it should be added, but you get what I mean.
In conclusion, berry is a great window manager that, in my opinion, follows the UNIX philosophy better than dwm does. Unless something overwhelmingly negative and completely unexpected comes up, it is unlikely that I will switch back to dwm.
If you don’t care about anything else I have said so far, my only advice would be to try berry out for yourself. At worst, you’ll lose ~20 minutes of your time and garner newfound respect for your current window manager.