treewm - Frequently Asked Questions

How can I restack windows?

There are many possibilies. Restacking is generally done by single clicks on a taskbar entry or on the inside of a window (if you additionally press Alt). The left button raises, the right button lowers, a right double click puts the window as low as possible. If you want to restack one window directly below another one, click successively on both windows with the middle mouse button.

What can I do with Alt and the mouse?

If GrabAltClick is enabled for the window you click on (default), you can do the similar things you can do with the taskbar, i.e. restacking (single clicks), moving/resising (left button), changing the virtual position (middle button), accessing the menu (right button), creating a desktop (left double click), selecting a target desktop (middle double click). There are many situations in which you want to access the parent desktop rather then the window itself, just press Ctrl+Alt then.
Three menus are available if you additionally press Shift:

• left button: application menu
• middle button: menu of all windows
• right button: menu of all windows that are below the pointer

Note that all of these actions work without Alt pressed on Desktops.
When you press Alt while creating or closing desktops, windows are collected and released. If you move the mouse out of a desktop (you will have to press Alt if autoscroll is disabled), the virtual position of that desktop is changed

How do I use these Icons?

Icons are raised/lowered if you raise an already raised desktop or if you press Alt+F7 or if you right-click on an icon or if you press i in command mode. A right double click on a taskbar entry or on the inner of a window lowers the window below the icons.

On which desktop are new windows placed?

Normally on the desktop that contains the window that has the focus. With the middle mouse button (double click) you can select a target desktop for a window. When a new window appears, treewm first tries the focus window's target, after that its parent's target, finally its parent. If a program was started by an action, this process is done when the action is executed, not when the app window appears.

What is this strange double click?

In order to shade a window, you can do a double click with two different mouse buttons on the taskbar. This requires a bit of practise, but is actually just as easy as a normal double click.

What is the difference between all those ways to set the options?

Generally, there are four things you can do with each options: set, unset, toggle and remove. "set", "unset" and "toggle" set or unset the option, "remove" restores the default (which usually depends on the parent desktop).
For desktops, you have even more ways to set the options: "set",... set the options both for the desktop and for its children, "dset",... only for the desktop itself, "cset",... only for its children. The options of all children are updated when you change the parent's options.

What is the command mode?

You can enter the command mode by pressing Alt+Space, and exit it using Alt+Space, Alt+Return, Return (if the line is empty) or Esc (ignores the content of the line). In the command mode, you can do nearly everything you would normally do using the mouse. See the README for a description of all commands. If you want to control treewm from shell scripts, you can write commands to the fifo ~/.cmdtreewm. Note that the command mode is in early stage of development and will probably improved in the future.