Built, Installed, Started... unresponsive

[alazyworkaholic]

I followed the quickstart instructions. My only manual intervention was to set NoDisplay=false in /usr/share/xsessions/adwm.desktop so it would show up as an option in lightdm. I've not yet defined any custom configuration.

I start adwm... and nothing happens.
I expected Alt+t would open a terminal, or Win+p might open a menu, but no. None of the key combos in the manual work... with the sole exception of quitting via Ctrl+Alt+q or Win+Shift+q which drops be back into lightdm. That's really the only indication adwm started at all.

What am I doing wrong?

(And is there no default key for a launcher, like dmenu?)

[bbidulock]

Your not doing anything wrong. Although adwm will run stand-alone nicely, as does dwm or spectrwm, the default key bindings are set to use the suite of xde tools and the xdg launcher by default. See /usr/share/adwm/styles/Default/keysrc which defines the default key bindings. The Adwm*spawn commands at the end of that file are the default hot-key launchers. There you will see that 'Alt x' will launch a uxterm, but it uses xdg-launch program to do so. You can download and install the xdg-launch program from xdg-launch. That should get you started. xdg-launch also provides a dmenu_launch command that will run dmenu with the available desktop apps from /usr/share/applications instead of commands from /usr/bin. It is very light-weight and is useful for any EWMH/NetWM compliant window manager.

Asside from that, you might want to build and install the light-weight GTK2 based xde tools. The main ones that work well with adwm are:

• xde-menu provides a root menu for adwm and many other light-weight window managers. (You can invoke this with the right-button on the window menu as long as your light-dm will autostart it).
• xde-ctools provides various utilities like window menus, workspace menus, popup-pagers. Many default adwm key and mouse bindings invoke these utilities.
• xde-session provides logout utilities, desktop choosers, etc. The logout utility in this package is invoked by 'Alt+Ctrl+Delete'. It work well with many light-weight window managers.
• xde-styles, xde-theme, xde-icons and xde-sound provide some styles, themes, icon themes, and sound themes for adwm and other light-weight window managers. You will also find some specific desktop themes in the various xde-theme-* repositories on my account on github. These support multiple background images (one per desktop) and provides a framework for building you own themes. The themes are supported across all light-weight window managers supported by xde (which is quite a few).

I'm sorry, I have really not done a very good job of pointing these things out in the documentation. Perhaps as a newcomer to adwm, you could suggest the best first place for me to start documenting this so other newcomers to adwm could have a easier time of it.

[mxmilkiib]

The best place IMO would be on the wiki :)

Possibly create a meta package for the AUR?

Possibly even knock up an https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/archiso based example image, which would make it even easier to experience it all working properly together.