This is a port of dwm to make it more accessible being used in Xquartz, Apple's version of the X Window Server.

The following fixes were made to make it more usable on MacBooks, iMacs, etc.:

• Use of Modkey2 (Cmd key) instead of Alt/Option
  • This means that Apple's Option key can still be used to enter special characters such as @, ~, etc.
• A configurable bottom margin if a bottom dock is present (the margin can be defined in dwm.c under BOTTOM_BAR_HEIGHT).
• A more sensible approach to tagging and switching layouts, with consideration that no system shortcuts are being overwritten.
  • For instance, in vanilla dwm, tag spaces are changed using Alt+Shift+[Number]). However, if Alt is being replaced by Cmd, Cmd+Shift+3 or Cmd+Shift+4 would take a screenshot instead.

dwm-mac uses the following keyboard shortcuts:

By default, dwm-mac uses a patched artwiz cure font to display some nice icons in the statusbar. However, you can change the following line to any font you want:

static const char font[] = "-artwiz-cure-medium-*-*-*-11-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-*";

Use xfontsel to get the name of the font you want to use.

Using Apple's Xquartz, there is a small modification you need to make to get icons in the statusbar: The patched artwiz cure font is selected by specifying an iso8859-1 encoding, though you probably want Xquartz to use UTF-8 encoding. However, running any dwm in Xquartz won't be able to display special glyphs in that way. That's why you need to start dwm-mac like this (put this into your .xinitrc or any other script that launches dwm-mac):

LANG=en_US.iso8859-1 exec /usr/local/bin/dwm

You can look at my dotfiles to get an idea of how I run dwm-mac on my machine.

If you are new to Xquartz on OS X, here is some additional information to get you started with Xquartz and dwm-mac:

• First, open Xquartz's preferences (select X11 - Preferences).
• On the "Input" tab, make sure that the 2nd lowest option is not selected. This is an option that should be enabled for some legacy apps (for instance, emacs) that depend on a Meta key. If you check this option, you won't be able to type special characters such as @ because the Mode_switch key (Apple's Option key) will be replaced by Meta.
  • If you really need a Meta key, you could use xmodmap to turn another key into Meta.
• On the "Output" tab, you can choose to run Xquartz as a fullscreen application. Keep in mind however that this is not the same kind of fullscreen apps that are famous since OS X Lion. Instead, Xquartz will not be visible until you press Cmt+Option+A. If you Cmd+Tab out of Xquartz and back into it, you would have to press this shortcut again. Because of this clunky behaviour, it's best to leave this option unchecked.
  • In general, it's best to go back to Xquartz by clicking on its dock icon instead of Cmd+Tabbing to it. (Ignore this line if you are already running Xquartz's latest beta version.)
  • There is some interesting behaviour you can achieve though--imagine you have a half-screen sized browser window open to your right, while vim is opened in dwm-mac. If you switch back into Xquartz using Cmd+Tab or by pressing its dock icon, Xquartz will get full focus again and will probably overlap your browser window. If you need the browser window on your side to write something in vim, just click into vim's window to focus it, however the browser window will not lose focus and won't be overlapped!
• When running xterm or other commandline apps, copy text by pressing and holding the right mouse button to select some text, and press the middle mouse button once to paste something.