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Tutorial
The hardest thing in spectrwm is getting started. You start it and suddenly you are looking at a blank screen, now what? Where is my terminal at?
Fear not! Press Windows/Apple key + Shift + Enter and voilà there she is, a magnificent terminal. If this did not work, you probably have to press Alt-Shift-Enter instead; this will be explained later.
Before we go into more specifics we have to go over some spectrwm terminology.
The master area is defined as the anchor of the screen. This is the area of the physical screen where the first window appears but not the subsequent ones. In the default configuration using a vertical stack, the master area is the window on the top left-hand side of the physical screen. As you open more windows they appear on the right-hand side and divide the non-master area by the number of available windows.
See figure 1.
The stack refers to the non-master area where windows are 'stacked'. If you open more than 3 windows you'll see this in action. Assuming the default vertical stack mode, you'll see that the right-hand side of the screen shows 2 windows. This is 'the stack'. Note that two modes of operation in spectrwm are referred to as vertical ([|]) and horizontal ([-]) stacking.
See figure 2.
By default, there are ten workspaces (a.k.a. ws). Numbered from 1 through 0 on the keyboard. Workspaces are typically used for collections of activities. For example, workspace 1 is for chatting, workspace 2 is for email etc. Workspaces are meant to help the human organize their activities. A window can not exist in multiple workspaces.
Regions are logical screens that may or may not represent physical screens. Typically regions do represent physical screens. A good example is a multi-screen setup. Without modification, a two screen setup will result in two regions, one per monitor.
All keyboard shortcuts are abbreviated to something like this: M-S-enter. The abbreviations are as follows:
- M Meta
- S Shift
- Button
The Meta key is special and is different based on what hardware you are using. On a PC it typically is either the Alt (Mod1) or Windows (Mod4) key. On a Mac, it typically is the Apple (Mod2) key. The default is the Alt key on order to support old and non-PC keyboards. The setting to alter this is modkey.
Button indicates a mouse button. Button1 is left mouse button, Button2 is middle mouse button and Button3 is the right mouse button.
Jumping between workspaces is very simple. Simply press M-Number to jump to a workspace. For example, M-1 jumps to workspace 1, M-2 jumps to workspace 2 etc. The outlier here is M-S-0 which jumps to workspace 10.