Bspwm

Bspwm is a tiling window manager that represents windows as the leaves of a full binary tree.

In Athena OS, Bspwm shows different rices to fit the best workspace environment the user would like to work on.

The environment consists of several elements that will shown in this chapter.

Each Bspwm rice has its own bar but they provides common features:

Application Menu

By clicking on Athena or Arch logo icon, or by pressing SUPER + SPACE on your keyboard, the Application Menu will spawn. Here, you can find and open any installed application you wish to run.

Window Switcher

Some rices have an icon showing overlapping windows that help you to switch among opened windows. In the image below, the window switcher is opened on the workspace 3 and shows windows opened in workspace 1 and 2.

You can also spawn it by pressing CTRL + ALT + W.

Workspaces

All the rices allow you to switch among workspaces. The difference of workspace menu inside each rice consists only of icons: glyphs or numbers.

Hack The Box Toolkit

Bspwm environment integrates with Hack The Box platform. TODO

System Metrics

On the bar, you can find some metrics about the system resource consumption like brightness percentage, disk space, CPU and RAM usage.

By clicking on the disk space icon, you can mount any existing drives (i.e., disk, partition or USB drives) to your system.

As example, if you would like to use your USB drive, plug it in your computer, click on disk space icon, and on the popup window move to Mount and press Enter. You will get a list of drives, and among them, you will get the disk and the partition of your USB drive, for example in my case:

/dev/sdb (14.6 G) disk
/dev/sdb1 (14.6 G) part

You must select the part element in order to see the files inside your USB drive. Then, a name of folder where the USB drive should be mounted will be asked to you, and, finally, you can access to it by ls /mnt/d_mount/<folder-name>.

Once you finished your activity by USB drive, you can unmount it by clicking on disk space icon, move to Umount and press Enter.

Network, Audio and Power

WiFi icon allows you to connect to a network while Bluetooth one to a Bluetooth device. In this part of the bar, you can also tune your volume and update your packages.

Finally, a power icon button allows you to logout, lock, restart or shutdown your system.

Desktop

The desktop is pretty simple in terms of elements. You have mainly a bar and a wallpaper.

If you wish to change your rice, press ALT + SPACE on your keyboard. A popup window containing the list of the rices appears:

Select your favourite and press Enter.

Keybindings

Here are reported some useful keybindings set by default in Athena OS Bspwm.

Application and System Management

Keybind	Description
Super + Enter	Open the Terminal
Super + ALT + Enter	Open floating Terminal
Super + Space	Open application menu
Super + {H, U}	Hide/Show menu bar
Super + ALT + W	Set random wallpaper
ALT + Space	Open rice selector
CTRL + ALT + W	Active window list
Print	Open screenshot pane
Super + K	Hack The Box spawn machine
Super + Shift + K	Hack The Box machine details
Super + SHIFT + I	Hack The Box VPN
Super + ALT + O	Open scratchpad
CTRL + Super + ALT + {P, R, Q, L, K}	Power off, Reboot, Log out, Lock screen, Kill an app
Shift + ALT + B	Open browser
Shift + ALT + G	Open VSCodium
Shift + ALT + E	Open File Manager
Shift + ALT + P	Open Pavucontrol
Shift + ALT + R	Open Ranger
Shift + ALT + W	Open Athena Welcome
Shift + ALT + M	Open Virt-Manager
Shift + ALT + V	Open Neovim
Shift + ALT + K	Open music
Super + {self, Shift} + Q	Close or kill the focused window

Note

self indicates that you don’t need to press anything on your keyboard to run an action. For example, Super + {self, Shift} + Q means:

• Super + Q closes the focused window
• Super + Shift + Q kills the focused window

Desktop and Window Selection

Keybind	Description
CTRL + ALT + {+, -, R}	Change transparency on focused window
Super + R	Rotate desktop elements of 90 degree
Super + C	Rotate the leaves of the element tree
Super + =	Make split ratio equal
Super + -	Make split ratio balanced (use ‘dash’ key for minus character)
Super + M	Make focused window maximized
Super + G	Swap the focused window by the biggest opened window
Super + {T, Shift + T, S, F}	Set the window state as tiled, pseudo tiled, floating or fullscreen
CTRL + ALT + {M, X, S, P, I}	Set the window flag as marked, locked, sticky, private, hidden
Super + {4, 5}	Focused window gaps scroll
Super + ALT + {4, 5}	Global window gaps scroll
Super + {self, Shift} + {Left, Down, Up, Right}	Focus the window in the given direction
ALT + {self, Shift} + TAB	Focus to the next or previous window in the current desktop
Super + ALT + {Left, Right}	Move among workspaces
Super + {`, TAB}	Focus the last window or desktop
Super + {O, I}	Focus the older or newer window in the focus history
ALT + {self, Shift} + {1-9,0}	Focus or move a window to the selected workspace

Desktop and Window Preselection

Keybind	Description
Super + CTRL + {Left, Down, Up, Right}	Preselect the direction
Super + CTRL + {1-9}	Preselect the ratio
Super + CTRL + Space	Cancel the preselection for the focused window
Super + CTRL + Shift + Space	Cancel the preselection for the focused workspace

Window Move/Resize

Keybind	Description
Super + ALT + {H, J, K, L}	Expand a window by moving one of its side outward
Super + ALT + Shift + {H, J, K, L}	Contract a window by moving one of its side inward
ALT + Shift + {Left, Down, Up, Right}	Move a floating window

Second Monitor

Keybind	Description
Super + ALT + Shift + {Left, Right}	Send window to the second monitor

Bspwm Management

Keybind	Description
Super + Esc	Reload sxhkdrc
Super + ALT + R	Reload Bspwm