DockWM

DockWM is a small GNUstep/AppKit dock-style window manager shell inspired by WindowMaker.

It supports two inputs:

• Dropping application bundles or executable paths from GNUstep tools such as apps-gworkspace onto the dock.
• Discovering small X11 top-level windows, including common WindowMaker dockapps, and reparenting them into an X11 dock host.

Build

make

Run

./DockWM.app/DockWM

The AppKit dock accepts filesystem drops. A companion X11 override-redirect host window is created next to it for dockapps and other small X11 clients.

The dock remains visible on every workspace. Run the workspace regression check with sh Tests/run-all-workspaces.sh (requires Xvfb, Window Maker, wmctrl, xprop, and xwininfo). It switches among three workspaces on an isolated display and checks that the dock stays visible.

Pinned applications that are moved or removed leave a question-mark placeholder in their saved position by default. The tooltip identifies the missing app, and its launch arguments and behavior settings are retained. The Dock checks for changes every 15 seconds and restores the icon if the original path becomes available again.

Disable Keep placeholders for missing applications in Settings → Behavior to remove missing entries instead.

The missing-application regression checks can be run with:

sh Tests/run-missing-applications.sh

These checks require clang, GNUstep, and xvfb-run.

Window discovery runs in small batches so that full X11 sweeps yield to clicks and icon-manager requests. Each batch handles at most eight windows and checks an 8 ms budget between windows; a single slow X server reply can exceed that budget. Newly mapped windows still use the event-driven discovery path.

Run the X11 regression tests with an installed GNUstep GUI backend and Xvfb:

sh Tests/run-window-scan.sh
sh Tests/run-x11-efficiency.sh
sh Tests/run-miniwindow-suppression.sh

The window-scan test creates 128 clients and verifies main-loop responsiveness, complete discovery without duplicate classification, coalesced refreshes, known-window updates, destruction during a scan, and discovery of new clients while a sweep is active.

Icon suppression uses the _GNUSTEP_WM_ATTR application-icon and miniwindow style bits, regardless of window dimensions. Miniwindow unmapping respects the miniwindow preference. Window Maker application tiles are identified by the _WINDOWMAKER_APP_ICON property (type WINDOW, one owning client window ID), published by the companion gs-wmaker change. When that property is absent, DockWM falls back to a validated Window Maker noticeboard plus an anonymous override-redirect root window with the icon event mask and XDND support. Named clients, transient windows, and containers of ordinary windows are excluded from both fallback paths. If both attribute matches fail, exact 48×48 or 64×64 dimensions are used as the final fallback. The explicit marker and legacy attribute matches do not require those dimensions. Both fallback paths are heuristic. Dockapp discovery uses explicit DockApp class and WM_HINTS icon-window metadata instead of size heuristics.

Run sh Tests/run-overlay-preservation.sh to check preservation of unmarked overlay windows, including windows with XDND support and icon-like event masks. Run sh Tests/run-windowmaker-icons.sh /path/to/gs-wmaker/src/wmaker to verify that Window Maker publishes the marker and DockWM unmaps the resulting tile, then removes the marker and verifies the legacy fallback on the same tile. This test uses an isolated display and requires xdotool.

Before launching an application, DockWM saves GSSuppressAppIcon = YES in that application’s defaults domain, preserving its other preferences. This applies to app bundles, executables, and applications launched through desktop files; no suppression argument is added to the command line. DockWM also sets this default for itself before creating its application object.

At startup, DockWM writes GSUseIconManager to the GNUstep global defaults domain. It defaults to enabled. Turn off Settings → Behavior → Use icon manager for all applications to disable it; the global choice is saved immediately and retained across restarts. Applications read this setting when starting, so restart running applications to pick up a change. DockWM no longer writes this setting into individual application domains. At startup it removes saved per-application GSUseIconManager overrides so applications inherit the global choice, preserving their other preferences.

Run sh Tests/run-icon-manager-preferences.sh to check the default, persistence, and migration of per-application overrides using an isolated defaults database.