Dwm (dynamic window manager) is a free minimal tiling window manager for X. Its development is woven around a core codebase with contributions from others kept as patches against the core dwm. Here are some of my patches.
The climit patch is almost identical to the clientspertag patch by pancake. Setting a climit restricts the number of windows shown in the tiled mode to a given number and adds a notification about the number of windows NOT displayed in the statusbar. It also features a "scrolling monocle" behavior when climit is 1 (change in focus changes the displayed window and cyles through all the windows for the given selection of tags).
{ MODKEY, XK_q, setclimit, "1" }, \
{ MODKEY, XK_w, setclimit, "2" }, \
{ MODKEY, XK_a, setclimit, "3" }, \
This makes Alt-q, Alt-w and Alt-a toggle climit to the given values.
This is a grid layout patch which vertically expands the windows in the first column in case there are not enough windows to complete a grid.
It is generally painful to restart dwm (in my case even X) every time a small config change is made or a patch is applied. The following launcher script solves the problem.
while true; do date; (anything else for the statusbar goes here too) done | while true; do dwm; done
The status text patch allows addition of dwm internal strings to the dwm input statusbar. Its configuration is done in config.h. It currently supports showing the number of windows hidden because of activating (pancake's) clientspertag. The patch demonstrates how to configure the status text in config.h and how to add support for a given notification.
This patch is over pancake's nmaster/clientspertag patch for an enhanced monocle mode in which if cpt is activated with one client, then changing focus (using meta-j, meta-k) 'scrolls' through the visible clients.