tile - Pure Assembly Tiling Window Manager

Tiling window manager written in x86_64 Linux assembly. No libc, no toolkit, pure syscalls. Speaks X11 wire protocol directly via Unix socket.

Part of the CHasm (CHange to ASM) suite, alongside bare (shell), show (file viewer), and glass (terminal emulator).

A tile-managed desktop: row-of-squares bar across the top, tabs on the left, workspace indicators on the right, glass panes in a master/stack layout, strip + the asmites (the per-segment programs in chasm-bits) driving the status row above tile's bar, show in the left + bottom-right panes, bare behind the prompt. Every binary on screen is pure x86_64 assembly.

Status: daily-driver since 2026-04 (the author runs nothing else). See PLAN.md for the full architecture and roadmap, and CONFIG-FUTURE.md for hardcoded constants that may become ~/.tilerc keys later.

Goals

• Replace i3 + i3bar + i3status + conky + stalonetray for the author's daily workflow
• No floating windows. Tiling only.
• Tabbed layout as default (matches typical vim/glass usage)
• Smart workspace cycling (Win+Right/Left walks only populated workspaces; Win+N jumps direct)
• Workspace pinned to output (external monitor always shows a designated workspace)
• A real bar (strip) with system tray (XEMBED) — coming in phase 2

Build (requires nasm and ld)

git clone https://github.com/isene/tile.git
cd tile
make

Run safely under Xephyr (development)

Xephyr is a nested X server that runs as a window inside your existing X session. tile inside Xephyr cannot affect your host i3/Gnome/KDE session, so a crash or bug just kills the Xephyr window.

sudo apt install xserver-xephyr        # Debian/Ubuntu (Arch: xorg-server-xephyr)

make xephyr                            # windowed Xephyr (1280x800)
make xephyr-multi                      # dual-output simulation (+xinerama)

A subtlety about keybindings

Xephyr (even with -fullscreen) does not shield keystrokes from the host window manager. The host WM's passive key grabs fire first — if your host i3 binds Mod4+Return, then Mod4+Return typed inside Xephyr is captured by i3, not delivered to tile.

For development under i3, bind tile to chords i3 doesn't grab. Alt is essentially unused by typical i3 configs, so the built-in defaults (when there is no ~/.tilerc) are:

Key	Action
Alt+Return	Spawn glass
Alt+q	Close the focused window cleanly (WM_DELETE_WINDOW)
Alt+Shift+q	Exit tile

Once you cold-switch from i3 to tile on real hardware, Mod4+-style binds work fine — see tilerc.example for the config syntax.

To launch a test app inside the Xephyr session:

DISPLAY=:9 glass                        # or: DISPLAY=:9 xterm

Current capabilities

• X11 wire protocol over Unix socket, MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1 authentication
• Claims SubstructureRedirectMask on the root (single-WM enforcement)
• ICCCM WM_DELETE_WINDOW — kill asks the app to close cleanly
• 10 workspaces with workspace N / move-to N / smart cycling (workspace next-populated walks only populated workspaces) / workspace back-and-forth
• Per-workspace layout: TABBED, SPLIT_H, SPLIT_V, MASTER. New windows append; cycle / reorder / move tabs across workspaces. Closing the active tab auto-focuses the next-most-recent one. Tab cycling in TABBED reconfigures the new active before mapping, so siblings sized in MASTER/SPLIT take the full TABBED geometry on cycle (no half-screen leftovers).
• Multi-output (Xinerama) with workspace-pinned outputs: a designated workspace always shows on the external monitor.
• Row-of-squares bar at the very top: WS squares grouped [1 2 3]·[4 5 6]·[7 8 9]·[0] with configurable per-WS colour overrides, vertical separator bar, layout-mode glyph (TABBED ☰, SPLIT_H ▌▐, SPLIT_V ▀▄, MASTER ▌▘▖), then the tab strip (current = bright, others dimmed).
• strip status row (companion bar) with text segments fed by the chasm-bits asmites (clock, battery, cpu, mem, disk, net, mailbox, brightness, vol, weather, wintitle). Per-segment refresh interval, +N leading-gap override, default-fg colour, all driven by ~/.striprc.
• XEMBED system tray (phase 2c) — apps that emit _NET_WM_S0 selection requests dock into strip's tray area.
• Stash / unstash — i3 scratchpad replacement: a small LIFO of unmapped tabs you can pop back to the current workspace.
• In-place restart — restart action does execve("/proc/self/exe"), picking up a freshly-built tile binary without losing any X clients (X owns the windows, WM just reconnects).
• WM-initiated unmaps don't get treated as window-closed
• ~/.tilerc and ~/.striprc config parsers (reload via SIGUSR1)

See tilerc.example for the full config syntax. Recognised statements: bind <chord> <action> [arg], exec <cmdline>, key = value for bar appearance, # comments. Modifiers: Shift, Ctrl/Control, Alt/Mod1, Mod4/Win/Super. Actions: exec, exec-here, kill, exit, workspace, move-to, focus, move-tab, stash, unstash, layout, spawn-split, reload, restart, overview.

The overview action opens a navigable HyperList of every window, grouped by workspace:

WS 1
   glass: Pointer ~/src
   glass: vim main.asm
WS 7
   Firefox: Example Docs
WS 8
   glass: htop

Each row is one window, labelled class: title (from WM_CLASS + _NET_WM_NAME) with a colour bullet matching its tab colour. Walk the list with ↑/↓ (or j/k, with wraparound), Home/End, PageUp/PageDown. Enter jumps: on a WS N header it switches to that workspace; on a window row it makes that window the active tab and switches to its workspace. Esc closes. Selection starts on the current workspace.

Text is drawn with an embedded A8 glyph atlas via the X RENDER extension (the same path strip uses), so tile needs no font server. The whole engine is cold until the overview is first opened — nothing is captured or polled when it's closed. Bind it with e.g. bind Mod4+e overview.

Packages

Debian/Ubuntu: every release ships a dependency-free static amd64 .deb — grab it from the latest release and:

sudo apt install ./tile_*_amd64.deb

Arch: a PKGBUILD is included in the repo root:

git clone https://github.com/isene/tile.git && cd tile && makepkg -si

The packages install the strip status bar as tile-strip (/usr/bin/strip belongs to binutils).

License

Unlicense (public domain)