Installing

In the future, it would be cool to have a .desktop file which can be thrown in wherever. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to make one that works so you need to use xinit/startx instead.

First, clone the repo somewhere and copy the files in config to ~/.config/xest/

If you want to build from source, just run "stack build && stack install" to install the binary to your .local/bin folder.

If you don't want to build from source, check out the releases page for a binary. I have no idea if the binary will work on other distros, but it works on arch and might not require installing any Haskell packages.

Once you have the binary, you need to set up your ~/.xinitrc file. At the very least, you need "exec ". Since Xest doesn't provide any autostart mechanisms, you should put any extra programs like Compton, feh, or polybar in there as well. Just write the command (without any exec prefix) and add a & at the end of the line. These should go before the line with the exec prefix.

Finally, kill whatever existing X servers are running (like GDM, LightDM, i3, etc) then run startx from a tty. If everything works, you should see Xest now.

Help!

It just crashes back to the terminal! Try checking out /var/log/Xorg.0.log and see if anything near the end stands out. Otherwise, try adding "&> mylog.txt" to the end of the exec line to see what Xest is outputting. It's pretty quiet by default but might have some useful information.

All I see is my wallpaper and typing keys doesn't do anything! Try clicking with the mouse then pressing the super key. Sometimes keyboard input gets lost when there aren't any windows and that needs to be fixed at some point...

I've discovered a bug! Let me know and I'll try to fix it.