Bspwm won't read config file

Help
1

I installed NixOS yesterday and so far I really like it. I have one big problem though and that is related to bspwm and sxhkd.

bspwm starts up and I can open terminals and stuff like that, but it seems like bspwm doesn’t read the config file.

I can’t change workspace, nothing happens. Nothing in my bspwm config is acutally set on boot. I tried this by changing the split ratio which had no effect at all.

As I understand from the NixOS options page is that i really don’t need to specify the config path if it’s in ~/.config/bspwm/bspwmrc. I’ve tried both to specify the path and completely remove it from the configuration.nix, same issue no matter what.

I tried to run bspc in terminal and got the following:

~ → bspc
No arguments given.

When I try to swap desktop:

~ → bspc desktop -f 2
desktop -f: Invalid descriptor found in '2'.

I did search the forum and some people have had the same problem and it seems like most solving this by using home-manager. I don’t want to do that, yet at least. I want to learn a bit of how Nix works first.

Right now my configuration.nix looks like this:

services.xserver = {
  enable = true;
  xkb.layout = "se";
  displayManager.defaultSessiopn = "none+bspwm";
  windowManager.bspwm = {
    enable = true;
    configFile = "/home/user/.config/bspwm/bspwmrc";
    sxhkd.configFile = "/home/user/.config/sxhkd/sxhkdrc";
  };
};
2

Hey, welcome to NixOS discourse!

Quick question: is your user called user or something else?

The documentation for the option configFile says this: “Path to the bspwm configuration file. If null, $HOME/.config/bspwm/bspwmrc will be used.”

So yes, technically you can just leave this blank, it will default to null and read bspwmrc from your user’s home directory.

3

No, I changed that for the post only, it’s the right user name in the config file. This doesn’t seems to work for me at all though, no matter if I put the path or leave it out. I also tried with ~/ and windowManager.bspwm.configFile = builtins.getEnv "HOME" + "/.config/bspwm/bspwmrc";.

4

So if you just do

  windowManager.bspwm = {
    enable = true;
  };

That doesn’t work? Because reading the docstring, I feel it should work.

5

Nope, that doesn’t work. I thought that it would work since the options page say it should, that’s why I’m so confused about this.

6

Make sure the Shebang in bspwmrc is correct and works on NixOS.

2 Likes
7

That’s awkward. I didn’t think about that. Swapped out bash to sh, now it seems to work fine :slight_smile:

8

Yeah I remembered I had this problem when I started with NixOS many years ago.