NAME

dvtm - dynamic virtual terminal manager

SYNOPSIS

dvtm [-v] [-M] [-m modifier] [-d delay] [-h lines] [-t title] [-s status-fifo] [-c cmd-fifo] [command ...]

DESCRIPTION

dvtm is a dynamic tiling window manager for the console. As a console window manager it tries to make it easy to work with multiple console based applications.

OPTIONS

-v: Print version information to standard output and exit.
-M: Toggle default mouse grabbing upon startup. Use this to allow normal mouse operation under X.
-m modifier: Set command modifier at runtime.
-d delay: Set the delay ncurses waits before deciding if a character that might be part of an escape sequence is actually part of an escape sequence.
-h lines: Set the scrollback history buffer size at runtime.
-t title: Set a static terminal title and don't change it to the one of the currently focused window.
-s status-fifo: Open or create the named pipe status-fifo read its content and display it in the statusbar. See the dvtm-status script for an usage example.
-c cmd-fifo: Open or create the named pipe cmd-fifo and look for commands to execute which were defined in config.h.
command ...: Execute command(s), each in a separate window.

USAGE

Keyboard commands

Mod: Each keybinding begins with Mod which defaults to ^g, but can be changed in config.h or with the -m command line option.
Mod-c: Create a new shell window.
Mod-C: Create a new shell window using the current working directory of the focused window.
Mod-x-x: Close focused window.
Mod-l: Increases the master area width about 5% (all except grid and fullscreen layout).
Mod-h: Decreases the master area width about 5% (all except grid and fullscreen layout).
Mod-i: Increase number of windows displayed in the master area.
Mod-d: Decrease number of windows displayed in the master area.
Mod-j: Focus next window.
Mod-k: Focus previous window.
Mod-J: Focus next non minimized window.
Mod-K: Focus previous non minimized window.
Mod-n: Focus the n-th window.
Mod-Tab: Focus previously selected window.
Mod-.: Toggle minimization of current window.
Mod-m: Maximize current window (change to fullscreen layout).
Shift-PageUp
Mod-PageUp: Scroll up.
Shift-PageDown
Mod-PageDown: Scroll down.
Mod-Space: Toggle between defined layouts (affects all windows).
Mod-Enter: Zooms/cycles current window to/from master area.
Mod-f: Change to vertical stack tiling layout.
Mod-b: Change to bottom stack tiling layout.
Mod-g: Change to grid layout.
Mod-s: Show/hide the status bar.
Mod-S: Toggle position of the status bar between top and bottom.
Mod-r
Mod-^L: Redraw whole screen.
Mod-a: Toggle keyboard multiplexing mode, if activated keypresses are sent to all visible windows.
Mod-M: Toggle dvtm mouse grabbing.
Mod-e: Enter copy mode (see section below for further information).
Mod-/: Enter copy mode and start searching forward (assumes a vi-like editor).
Mod-p: Paste last copied text from copy mode at current cursor position.
Mod-?: Show this manual page.
Mod-Mod: Send the Mod key.
Mod-F[1..n]
Mod-v-[1..n]: View all windows with nth tag.
Mod-0: View all windows with any tag.
Mod-v-Tab: Toggles to the previously selected tags.
Mod-V-[1..n]: Add/remove all windows with nth tag to/from the view.
Mod-t-[1..n]: Apply nth tag to focused window.
Mod-T-[1..n]: Add/remove nth tag to/from focused window.
Mod-q-q: Quit dvtm.

Mouse commands

Copy and Paste: By default dvtm captures mouse events to provide the actions listed below. Unfortunately this interferes with the standard X copy and paste mechanism. To work around this you need to hold down Shift while selecting or pasting text. Alternatively you can disable mouse support at compile time, start dvtm with the -M flag or toggle mouse support during runtime with Mod-M.
Button1 click: Focus window.
Button1 double click: Focus window and toggle maximization.
Button2 click: Zoom/cycle current window to/from master area.
Button3 click: Toggle minimization of current window.

Copy mode gives easy access to past output by piping it to an editor. What ever the editor prints to stdout upon exiting will be stored in an internal register and can be pasted into other clients (via Mod-p )

ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES

DVTM: Each process spawned by dvtm will have this variable set to the dvtm version it is running under.
DVTM_WINDOW_ID: Each process also has access to its constant and unique window id.
DVTM_CMD_FIFO: If the -c command line argument was specified upon dvtm startup, this variable will be set to the file name of the named pipe. Thus allowing the process to send commands back to dvtm.
DVTM_TERM: By default dvtm uses its own terminfo file and therefore sets TERM=dvtm within the client windows. This can be overridden by setting the DVTM_TERM environment variable to a valid terminal name before launching dvtm.
DVTM_EDITOR: When entering the copymode dvtm pipes the whole scroll back buffer to DVTM_EDITOR which is launched with - (indicating to read from stdin) as its only argument. If DVTM_EDITOR is not set EDITOR is checked, if this is also not set the default value specified in config.h is used instead.

EXAMPLE

See the dvtm-status script as an example of how to display text in the status bar.

CUSTOMIZATION

dvtm is customized by creating a custom config.h and (re)compiling the source code. This keeps it fast, secure and simple.

AUTHOR

dvtm is written by Marc André Tanner <mat at brain-dump.org>