This means that, unlike most other tiling window managers, Penrose is not a binary that you install on your system. Instead, you use it like a normal dependency in your own crate for writing your own window manager. Don't worry, the top level API is well documented and a lot of things will work out of the box, and if you fancy digging deeper you'll find lots of opportunities to customise things to your liking.

The user facing docs for penrose are written using mdBook and published to GitHub Pages here. They cover some more general concepts about how to get up and running as opposed to the crate docs on docs.rs which are more aimed at covering the APIs themselves and are what you would expect from an open source library.

The current version of the docs build from the head of the develop branch can be found here.

If you want to have a look at how it all comes together then the examples directory of this repo has several different starting points for you to begin with and my personal set up can be found here. (You almost certainly don't want to use my set up in full but it should serve as a good reference for what a real use case looks like!)

First and foremost, you should refer to the docs (both the book and API docs) if you are looking to learn about Penrose and how it all works. The GitHub issue tracker is also an excellent resource for learning about solutions to common problems. That said, I have had repeated requests for somewhere that people can have more open ended discussions about things and chat about their individual set ups so with that in mind, you can join us on discord here if that sounds like your thing.

Penrose was born out of my failed attempts to refactor the dwm codebase into something that I could more easily understand and hack on. While I very much admire and aim for minimalism in code, I personally feel that it becomes a problem when your code base starts playing code golf to keep things short for the sake of it.

I certainly won't claim that Penrose has the cleanest code base you've ever seen, but it should be readable in addition to being fast.

I've also tried my hand at Xmonad in the past. I love the setups people can achieve with it (this one is a personal favourite), but doing everything in Haskell was a deal breaker for me. I'm sure many people will say the same thing about Rust, but then at least I'm giving you some more options!

With Penrose, a simple window manager can be written in about 5 minutes and under 100 lines of code. It will be pretty minimal, but each additional feature (such as a status bar, scratch-pads, custom layouts, dynamic menus...) can be added in as little as a single line. If the functionality you want isn't available however, that leads us on to...

dwm patches, qtile lazy APIs, i3 IPC configuration; all of these definitely work but they are not what I'm after. Again, the Xmonad model of companion libraries that you bring in and use as part of writing your own window manager has always felt like the right model for me for extending the window manager.

Penrose provides a set of traits and APIs for extending the minimal core library that is provided out of the box. By default, you essentially get an event loop and a nice clean split between the "pure" state manipulation APIs for managing your windows and a "diff and render" layer that interacts with the X server. There are enough built-in pieces to show how everything works and then some more interesting / useful code available in the extensions module.

Parsing a config file and dynamically switching behaviour on the contents adds a large amount of complexity to the code, not to mention the need for validating the config file! By default, Penrose is configured statically in your main.rs and compiled each time you want to make changes (similar to Xmonad and dwm). There is no built-in support for hot reloading of changes or wrappers around the main window manager process.

That said, the extensibility of Penrose means that you are definitely able to define your own config file format and parse that as part of your startup, if that is something you want.

The choice is yours!

There are several places where Penrose makes use of external programs for utility functionality (reading the user's key-map or spawning a program launcher for example), but core window manager functionality is contained in the pure state data structures. This makes it a lot simpler to maintain the codebase and (importantly) provide a nice API to work with for extending the behaviour of your window manager.

As you might expect, you can definitely write your own extensions that provide some sort of IPC or client/server style mechanism if you want to mirror the kinds of things possible in other window managers such as i3 or bspwm, but that is not going to be supported in the core of the library itself.