#+title: My StumpWM setup
#&summary
How I've set up StumpWM on Trisquel
#&
#+license: bysa

* My StumpWM setup

I use StumpWM instead of e.g. Gnome. StumpWM is a tiling window manager, which
means that it's a good window manager.

** Problems

I never had any problems with StumpWM until I upgraded to Trisquel 4.0 and
Trisquel 4.5, after which StumpWM irregularly threw errors such as:
#+BEGIN_SRC
g_dbus_connection_real_closed: Remote peer vanished with error: Underlying
GIOStream returned 0 bytes on an async read (g-io-error-quark, 0). Exiting.
#+END_SRC
and also some fatal X errors which killed StumpWM and all its running
programs. This naturally annoyed me. I soon realized that it had nothing to do
with Trisquel, it was just that dependencies on things like D-Bus was getting
on StumpWM's nerves. I had always used an Xsession file to login to StumpWM:
#+BEGIN_SRC
[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Type=XSession
Exec=stumpwm
TryExec=stumpwm
Name=StumpWM
Comment=Stump window manager
#+END_SRC
but clearly, this wasn't good enough. Whenever I ran the default gnome-session
and whatever window manager was associated to that, there were no problems. And
while in gnome-session, I could always run:
: stumpwm --replace
to replace metacity or whatever with StumpWM. Except for an annoying
gnome-panel and Gnome taking over some of my keybindings, this worked
alright. The best thing was that when the fatal X error occured, only StumpWM
was killed --- all windows were maintained. This made me realize that one could
create a script which starts a new StumpWM instance whenever an old StumpWM
crashes, to create the illusion of a continually running StumpWM.

** Solution

I added this to my ~.profile~:
#+BEGIN_SRC sh
if [ "$DISPLAY" ] ; then
    pkill stumpwm
    # Restart StumpWM when it crashes
    while [ 1 ] ; do
        stumpwm --replace
        pkill stumpwm
    done
fi

# Since StumpWM will continue forever, this .profile file will block
# gnome-session from loading misc. crap.
#+END_SRC

You may also have to edit ~gnome-panel~ out of
~/desktop/gnome/session/required_components~ in ~gconf-editor~.

** Links

  + [[http://stumpwm.antidesktop.net/][StumpWM]]
  + [[https://gitorious.org/nqpz-config/nqpz-config/blobs/raw/master/home/.stumpwmrc][My .stumpwmrc]]