DWM Tile Window Manager Keyboard short cut keys Issue

Jean-Nicolas Boulay
1 min readFeb 26, 2022

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After installing dwm from Suckless on my WSL Kali environment, I ran into an issue where I couldn’t move the tiles from one tag to another.

To be more specific, I couldn’t move a tile to tags 2, 3, and 6. I couldn’t figure out why until I tried debugging the situation with xev command (a utility that prints the content of X events).

It turns out that dwm wasn’t receiving the right outputs from my keyboard. The reason is my keyboard layout settings are for French Canada.

So some of the key combinations are not outputting the same values. Here is what it receives and what it expects:

French Canada:

  • shift + 2 = “
  • shift + 3 = /
  • shift + 6 = ?

English Canada/US:

  • shift + 2 = @
  • shift + 3 = #
  • shift + 6 = ^

I resolved the issue after switching my keyboard layout to English Canada.

I still need my French Canada keyboard layout for the accents. So I still need to figure out how to get around this issue with a French Canada keyboard layout.

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