Description
Enables hot-reloading of dwl; meaning almost all logic can be changed at runtime. This obviously requires some black magic so for now there's a glibc 2.0 or later dependency to this. In particular this allows for every option in config.h to be changed at runtime.
Reloading
To reload rebuild dwl.so, perhaps reinstall it and then run trigger reload function (bound to Mod+Shift+R by default).
This currently calls notify-send in order to inform you of a reloading taking place.
So in short:
- make changes to
config.hordwl.c - run
maketo rebuild dwl.so - run
sudo make installto reinstall dwl
Limitations
Reloading the compositor will replace all functionality except for main, setup, run and the reload logic.
Note that you're responsible yourself for reloading ressources like fonts, which may only get acquired once.
A lot of components of dwl will also only get run on a trigger (the tiling for example).
So not every change will be immediate.
Furthermore, any patch adding more global state to dwl cannot currently be reloaded properly since
we keep state in the cold part.
Notes
reduce compile errors
This patch triggers -Wpedantic a bunch (I don't think there's a way around this, dlsym yields void* pointers to functions).
This will show a lot of warnings but cause no errors.
So you may want to disable this compile option in order to get readable compiler output.
runtime dependencies
This does depend on you having a notification daemon like dunst or mako running as well as
having notify-send installed in order for the compositor to inform you of the reload.
How?
Most of all dwl functionality is moved into a shared object file dwl.so, which can be reloaded at runtime.
Download
- 0.7
- main 2025-05-30
- find the repo for the patch here
Authors
- Sivecano
- Sérécano at dwl Discord