Customize dwm on Fedora

So at work I’m using a Macbook, but OS X has increasingly interfered with my development routine.

The last drop that tipped the glass was no native support for Docker in OS X, obviously.

Hence I’m moving to using a Linux VM in VMware. I chose Fedora, because that’s what Linus uses¹.

Just kidding. I wanted to learn a Red Hat based distro this time, since Debian and Arch are already familiar to me.

After launching Fedora 23, I wanted to set up a tiling window manager. If you haven’t used one, try the magnificent Xmonad². This time I opted for dwm³, however, since it is supposed to “suck less” and there’s also strange appeal in light-weight C projects. The configuration of dwm is done by editing a configuration header in the C source files and by compiling the project. I could’ve just cloned the git repo and build the project myself, but I wanted to utilize the existing RPM package for dwm as an exercise.

A surprise in Fedora for me was that it had deprecated yum, the well-known package manager. Instead, it utilizes DaNdiFied yum, dnf. Let’s use it to get started:

$ dnf install rpmbuild
$ dnf download --source dwm

$ rpm -ivh dwm-6.0-13.fc23.src.rpm

You’ll end up with a ~/rpmbuild directory, which is a central location for storing RPM package builds. Next you’ll want to reuse the package information:

$ cd ~/rpmbuild
$ rpmbuild -ba SPECS/dwm.spec

Now you’ll have the folder ~/rpmbuild/BUILD/dwm-6.0, which you can edit, generate a patch and make RPM apply it on the build phase:

$ pushd BUILD/dwm-6.0 
$ git diff -p --relative config.def.h > dwm-customization.patch
$ mv dwm-customization.patch ~/rpmbuild/SOURCES/
$ popd

Edit the SPEC/dwm.spec file to apply the patch:

List the patch file:

 ...
 Patch5:         dwm-customization.patch
 ...

Run the patch command in the %prep section:

%patch5 -p1 -b .dwm-customization
Rebuild the package

rpmbuild -ba SPECS/dwm.spec
Reinstall the package:

dnf reinstall RPMS/x86_64/dwm-6.0-13.fc23.x86_64.rpm

And that’s it!

You’ve just modified an existing RPM package and reinstalled it. Remember, recompiling is the only way to configure dwm.