quartz-wm(1)

💅 quartz-wm — bestie, let me tell you about your window manager

okay so picture this: you're running the X Window System on OS X, and everything looks like… nothing. sad. flat. quartz-wm rolls up and gives all your X11 windows these gorgeous little titlebars that are trying so hard to match the native Mac OS X look and feel. it's giving "dressed up for the group chat photo" ✨. aquarium-adjacent. Aqua Window Manager, if you will 🐠.

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

quartz-wm [--prefs-domain domain]

that's it, that's the whole vibe check 🫶.

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🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

quartz-wm is a window manager for the X Window System, and its whole personality is: titlebars for X11 windows that aim to match the look and feel of native Mac OS X windows. iconic behavior honestly 👑.

The following options are available:

• --prefs-domain domain — this one lets you override the domain that preferences get read from. super useful if you want to have multiple X11.apps running at the same time, no cap 💅.

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🎀 CUSTOMIZATION 🎀

bestie, you can customize quartz-wm with the defaults(1) command. all the examples below are shown using the default org.x.X11 domain. if you're using a different domain (maybe you set it through the X11_PREFS_DOMAIN environment variable, or you passed the --prefs-domain command line argument), then you need to substitute that one instead, okay? don't forget 🫶.

also!! you can force quartz-wm to re-read all these preferences by sending it a SIGHUP using kill(1).

The available options are:

• defaults write org.x.X11 wm_ffm -bool true — enables focus-follows-mouse mode 🖱️. windows belonging to the X server may then be focused by just moving the pointer over them, as well as by the default mode of clicking in them.
• defaults write org.x.X11 wm_click_through -bool true — disables the default behavior of swallowing window-activating mouse events.
• defaults write org.x.X11 wm_limit_size -bool true — limits the size of each window to the size of the current head.
• defaults write org.x.x11 wm_focus_on_new_window -bool false — don't tell X11.app to take focus when a new X11 window is created. (yes, that's lowercase x11 up there, that's literally how it's written, don't come for me 🙈)
• defaults write org.x.X11 wm_window_shading -bool true — enables double clicking on a titlebar to shade the window ✨.
• defaults write org.x.X11 wm_auto_quit -bool true — automatically quits quartz-wm (thus shutting down the X11 server) when the last window is closed. bye bestie 😭👋.
• defaults write org.x.X11 wm_auto_quit_timeout -int 3 — sets the timeout for the auto-quit feature. if wm_auto_quit is true, then quartz-wm will wait this many seconds before attempting to shut down. and if another window gets created in that time, quartz-wm will not shut down. clingy in a cute way.
• defaults write org.x.X11 wm_show_shortcut -bool true — shows each window's key equivalent, if it has one, in its title bar 💖.

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🦋 LOGGING 🦋

quartz-wm sends its messages to syslogd(8) using asl(3). these logs go to the org.x facility, and you can watch them with this syslog(1) command:

$ syslog -w -k Facility eq org.x

by default, debugging logs are filtered out. you can adjust the filter to print debugging information for the running quartz-wm with this syslog 1 command:

$ syslog -c quartz-wm -d

see syslog(1) or asl(3) for more info on syslog filtering 🧚.

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🌈 ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES 🌈

• DISPLAY — this variable is used to determine which X server to use.
• X11_PREFS_DOMAIN — this variable is used as domain if the -prefs-domain command line option is not given. if neither -prefs-domain nor X11_PREFS_DOMAIN are set, then the default value of org.x.X11 is used instead.
• DEBUG — if this variable is set, debug logging will be printed to stderr in addition to asl. very "let me see everything" of you 👀.

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⭐ SEE ALSO ⭐

X(7), Xquartz(1), xpbproxy(1), xrdb(1), twm(1)

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and that's the whole page bestie, go forth and have the prettiest little X11 titlebars on the block 🎀✨💜

shoutout to the Debian gang — this beauty is dated May 13, 2011, mwah 💋