cherry (🍒) is a minimal floating window manager for X11, written in C, using XCB and Lua 5.3.

🍒 takes inspiration from awesome (regarding Lua configuration) as well as berry for the name.

All configuration is done through a configuration file, or the named pipe (discussed below). A configuration file is not needed. Sensible defaults will be provided in the absence of one.

By default, 🍒 will look in the location specified by the -c option. If no option is provided, 🍒 will:

• check if the XDG_CONFIG_HOME environment variable exists.
  • if so, the resulting location will be: $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/cherry/cherry.lua.
  • if not, default to: $HOME/.config/cherry/cherry.lua.

🍒 will attempt to create a named FIFO pipe at the location specified by the config variable fifo_path, which defaults to /tmp/cherry.

Communication over this pipe can be done with cherryc. As of August 1 2020, you can use cherryc to:

• reload the configuration file: -r
• create new tags/switch to a pre-existing tag: -t
• specify a custom pipe location: -f

An example usage, combining all options, would be cherryc -rtexample -f/tmp/example. cherryc configuration does not persist.

Compiling 🍒 yourself is as easy as installing Lua 5.3 and XCB, cloning the repository, then running make. Due to how tiny the 🍒 codebase is, full compilation should only take a few seconds at most.

cherryc can be compiled with make cherryc.