Up to WM Report

The Comprehensive List of Window Managers for Unix

This is a list of every freely available Window Manager I'm aware of (191 as of 20090328). New testing/alpha/beta versions won't be listed when a stable version is available. You can sort the table on a particular field by clicking on the header row (should work in any browser). Note: in IE the buttons make the columns disappear but they won't reappear. They work in Firefox.

I'm adding non-English WMs, with the caveat that English is the only language I speak. Perhaps I'll stick to projects that have been listed in freshmeat? For these reasons non-English projects may not have version number listings.

I'll be adding reviews/notes occasionally. Because of the size of the list I've placed some limits: nothing alpha quality, nothing that hasn't been updated in more than two years (unless it was highly influential ... or I just feel like it).

Recent adds: Velox (20100214), miNimalistic WM (although it's old).

Most recent updates: 20100313

Name	URLs	Version	Release date	Date checked	Authors	Notes
2wm	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.1	20070212	20100221	Anselm Garbe	"Stereo WM." Appeared to be a stripped/simplified version of dwm by the same author. He provided reasonably thorough documentation. The "homepage" listed here is the suckless.org "misc" download folder. 2wm periodically disappears.
3Dwm	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	not available		20100216	Niklas Elmqvist, Robert Karlsson.	One of the earliest attempts at 3D appearance in a WM. Site still available, but most files are gone.
5Dwm	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	not available			Eric Masson	Similar to the proprietary Silicon Graphics IRIX Magic Desktop, aka 4Dwm. Now called MaXX Interactive Desktop - please see that entry.
9wm	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	1.1	19960208	20100203	David Hogan	Imitates the 8-1/2 WM (Plan 9 OS). See also w9wm (which adds virtual desktops) and rio, which claims to be a more exact imitation. Often used as a code base for other WMs. 2003 Review
Aegis	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	SVN	20060411	20100224	Michael Brailsford	Child of Kahakai, based on aewm++. Code only available through SVN.
aewm	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	1.3.12	20071227	20100225	Decklin Foster	A very popular code base for many other WMs. 2003 Review
aewm++	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	xxx	20090528	20100313	Frank Hale	Sapphire and aewm++ are different aspects of a project by Frank Hale. aewm++ is a rewrite of aewm (which is in C) in C++. Source has recently reappeared (and been re-edited). 2003 Review
AfterStep	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	2.2.9	20080708	20100131	Sasha Vasko	"Originally based on the look and feel of the NeXTStep interface."
AHWM	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.90	20020224	20100217	Alex Hioreanu	"Alex Hioreanu's Window Manager." Free but non-GPL license. Astonishing for its comprehensive documentation. His primary motivation for writing this now-abandoned WM was to fix the problems he saw with sloppy focus. Notes
ajaxWM	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.2.6	20080228	20100217	server: Dennis Felsing, client: Andreas Waidler.	Ajax-based WM that runs entirely in a browser. Currently in alpha state and runs only in Firefox.
AlloyWM	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	not available				Last known address http://www.phatboydesigns.net/alloywm/ is now advertising space. Was a modification of aewm.
alpt-wm	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.0.7	20071013	20100203	AlpT	"This is my custom, window manager. It's small, functional and fast. It is based on dwm ..."
amaterus	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	not available		20100131	Hiroyuki Komatsu	GTK-based. Screen shots all show GNOME toolbar. Source (last known version 0.34.1 dated 20021124) is MIA. Website is disintegrating over time.
AmiWM	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.20pl48	19980315	20100131	Marcus Comstedt	Imitates the Amiga Workbench. Has its own "Generic amiwm License." Patch site that includes what may be an interesting patch (and the original source when the home site is down as 200902).
Anarchy	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	not available		20100226	Eduardo Cavazos	"CLOS oriented Scheme code. The implementation language is Gauche Scheme." It requires Gauche and gauche-x (probably by the same author). Homepage vanished between 20081229 and 20090212 (http://proteus.freeshell.org/anarchy/).
AntiRight	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	3.6	20071123	20100131	Jeffrey E. Bedard	Based on GTK+ 2.x. Meant to be low resource. It would appear that the actual window manager is the "gtkshell," but its functionality is so heavily tied in with "ACE" (also a part of the package) that a separate listing doesn't make sense.
AntiWM	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.0.5	20090531	20100131	Nolan Liebert	Written in C, "inspired by" Ratpoison (and inheriting the screen/emacs keys), all windows full screen, MIT license. Same author as TAL/wm and dwemo. The author Nolan Liebert is planning on maintaining this WM. Notes
Athene Desktop Edition	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	4.1	20040903	20100131	Rocklyte Systems	Athene is actually an operating system, but there is a package available that runs on top of a Linux kernel. It's a GUI that doesn't use X11/XOrg. The license is almost certainly not GPL, although this package is "freely available." v5.0 has been in beta over a year, but development appears to be ongoing.
awesome	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	3.4.3	20100104	20100223	Julien Danjou, Nikos Ntarmos, Aldo Cortesi.	"awesome is a highly configurable, next generation framework window manager for X. It is very fast, extensible and licensed under the GNU GPLv2 license." Tiling, originally based on dwm, includes Xinerama support. Notes
awm	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	2pl9	19951114	20100203	Jordan Hubbard	"The Ardent Window Manager was for a while a hotbed for hackers and offered some features (dynamic menus) not found on more current window managers." Based on uwm. "Homepage" link is to an archive at xwinman.org.
B4Step	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	2.2	20010627	20100211	Eric Boucher	Free to use, but not GPL. He supplies only binaries. Mash-up of Mac OS 8/9, GNOME, and OPENSTEP? Shaped windows. Version number and date is for Intel/RH 7.1 binary, there's a 2004 binary for Solaris. New domain 200808, but no other activities?
BadWM	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.1.1	20040915	20100217	Robert Annessi	Website: "Not actively maintained." Minimalist, no decorations.
Beryl	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	not available			Quinn_Storm, Dennis Kasprzyk, Nicholas Thomas, Robert Carr, Nigel Cunningham, Kristian Lyngstøl	Fork of the graphics-heavy Compiz. Compiz and Beryl have re-merged (started ~200705) to create Compiz Fusion.
Blackbox	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.70.1	20051103	20100218	Brad Hughes, then Jeff Raven, now Sean Shaleh Perry.	One of the mainstays of the alternative WM world. 2003 Review
Bluetile	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.3.1	20091224	20100301	Jan Vornberger	Based on XMonad, tiling/stacking WM intended for GNOME. Nice intro screencast, looks surprisingly easy to use - but has XMonad's Haskell requirement, and needs cabal to install. BSD-3 license.
BrainTop	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.1rc5	20060415	20100218	MadBob	Part of the "Lobotomy" project. The window manager "BrainTop" is a derivative of, and very similar to, XFCE's WM. New but incomplete site as of 20090422.
Clementine	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.0.7 beta	20020325	20100211	Dave Berton	Based on aewm, written in C++. "Clementine is only somewhat functional at the moment. Unless you plan to hack on the source, it is not recommended that you do much with it."
clfswm	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0906	20090619	20100131	Philippe Brochard	"Based on TinyWM and Stumpwm." Written entirely in Common Lisp, requires a lisp interpreter, or you can download the self-contained binary pack.
Compiz	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]					See Compiz Fusion as Compiz has now merged with it.
Compiz Fusion	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.8.4	20091014	20100131		"Compiz Fusion is the result of a merge between the well-known Beryl composite window manager and Compiz Extras, a community set of improvements to the Compiz composite window manager." They consider it alpha.
CTWM	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	3.8a	20070216	20100131	Previously Claude Lecommandeur, now Richard Levitte.	Adds virtual desktops and even more configurability to TWM. 2003 Review
cwm	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	release 3	20050828	20100226	Marius Aamodt Eriksen	Originally based on evilwm, now written from scratch.
dvtm	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.5.2	20090707	20100208	Marc Andre Tanner	Dynamic Virtual Terminal Manager: "dvtm brings dwm and its concept of tiling window management to the console." Borrowed some code from dwm. Text only. MIT/X Consortium License. Notes
dwemo	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	not available		20100224	Nolan Liebert	Trying to be very small. MIT License. Same author as TAL/wm and AntiWM. Author Liebert says it's currently "relatively unstable" (20080803 - my experience included crashing as soon as you ran a terminal) but that he plans to stabilize it enough for production use. Files disappeared ~200909.
dwm	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	5.7.2	20090927	20100226	Anselm Garbe	"Dynamic Window Manager," another keyboard-driven WM from the wmii people. "Because dwm is customized through editing its source code, it's pointless to make binary packages of it. This keeps its userbase small and elitist. No novices asking stupid questions." Version 5.2 source package 18kb. 4.8 on is supposed to include Xinerama support, I haven't checked. MIT license.
echinus wm	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.4.0	20100125	20100226	Alexander Polakov	Based on the same author's fwm, which was based on dwm's code base and took some ideas from Plan 9's rio. It's "in the spirit of dwm."
Eclipse	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	CVS		20100209	Nikos Drakos, Ross Moore, Erik Enge ...	Written in Common Lisp. Student programming project. Website available, pointer to CVS snapshot tarball is broken, CVS itself appears to be available. Several documents mentioned, but all are placeholders.
ede	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	1.2	20071116	20100131	v1: Martin Pekar, Mikko Lahtenaaki, Dejan Lekic, Alexey Parshin. v2: Sanel Zukan, Vedran Ljubovic.	Equinox Desktop Environment. "Familiar look and feel" which means "Windows."
Efsane II	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	not available			Serdar Öaut;zler.	Turkish. Written in C++. Site died 200908.
Elevate	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.2.0	20071118	20100131	Kostis Kapelonis	Part of "Project Elevate" to simplify our complex UIs. Requires a couple other components to complete the project, and labeled as pre-alpha. He's working on other parts of the project, the relatively old date on the WM isn't a clear indicator.
Enlightenment	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	e16-1.0.2	20100124	20100224	Orig. Geoff "Mandrake" Harrison and Carsten "Rasterman" Haitzler. Now a large team. Rasterman is still involved, Mandrake appears to have departed.	Bringing you shaped windows, configurability, and heavy graphics since 2000. Originally based on fvwm. DR17 (the WM formerly known as E17 with brilliant new features) has been promised since ~2002 (yes, for eight years), but their reach permanently exceeds their grasp. Slashdot announced big Samsung funding for E in 200911 - should be interesting. 2003 Review
EPIwm	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.5.6	20020110	20100226	Students at EPITA in France.	"Small, fast, light." School project. Appears fairly themeable.
EvilPoison	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]				Clive Crous	"A non-wimp window manager for X11 based loosely on evilwm and Ratpoison." Used to claim it was "evilwm source code with Ratpoison-like key bindings." Was subversion then git, now entirely gone (200908).
evilwm	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	1.0.1	20090311	20100202	Ciaran Anscomb	Minimalistic keyboard driven WM with vi- and nethack-like key bindings. 2003 Review
expocity	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	not available				Applied Apple Exposé-like behaviour to Metacity. Development discontinued around 2005: "This version is now outdated and the modern X window system nowadays allows for much better effects than what was possible with expocity." Web page deceased: last known address: http://www.pycage.de/#expocity .
failsafewm						Bundled with swm. See swm.
Firebox	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.5.0	20080123	20100226	Cyrille Bagard	Written from scratch in C, inspired by Fluxbox, HackedBox, Blackbox, Enlightenment, and WindowLab, but particularly by Openbox and wmii. Notes
Fluxbox	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	1.0.0	20071008	20100226	Henrik Kinnunen	Child of Blackbox with built-in keybindings and the tabs from PWM, quite popular. A personal favourite. 2003 Review
FLWM	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	1.02	20060630	20100211	Bill Spitzak	Vertical titlebars, inspired by (and codebase from) wm2. Requires fltk libraries by the same author. Review.
fpcbol	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	bol beta4	20080330	20100311	Florence Gestio	Not a WM, a "Desktop User Interface ... for childrens (and others) ... works with pentium 200 minimalist configuration." Requires festival and mbrola to speak. "FPC" indicates it's written for the Free Pascal Compiler. Requires Metacity or Compiz?.
Framer	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.1	20030421	20100211	Christoph Dietze	Written in old version of Eiffel and requires wxWindows (probably an old version), meant to go with ROX. Appears to be abandoned, ROX has moved on. Requires wxWindows.
fvwm	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	1.24r	19950726	20100211	Robert Nation et al.	Version 1 of this venerable WM is still used, but no longer supported.
fvwm2	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	2.4.20	20061209	20100211	Robert Nation et al.	Extremely flexible appearance and behaviour, and a very long history. Version date applies to stable version. 2003 Review
fvwm95	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	2.0.43f	20030503	20100211	Hector Peraza	fvwm2 modified to look and act like Windows 95. Among the downloads there is also a (older) file called fvwm98.
fvwm-crystal	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	3.0.6	20070623	20100211	Maciej Delmanowski	fvwm2 dressed up to look and act even better. Requires a recent version of fvwm2.
fwm	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	not available			Alexander Polakov	The abandoned predecessor to echinus wm. Based on dwm's source code, partly inspired by Plan 9's rio. Site disappeared ~200810, last known address http://koluthcka.ru/fwm/fwm.html
fxwm	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	not available		20100214	Sander Jansen	"FOX Desktop", built using the FOX toolkit. The homepage listed above is the author's. No download is available.
GNOME	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	2.28	20090923	20100302		This is a Desktop Environment and NOT a Window Manager. They rely on other WMs, previously Enlightenment and Sawfish, now Metacity or Compiz.
Golem	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.0.6	20060301	20100214	Orig. Jordan DeLong, now Bruce Ashfield.	Nice looking, promising project with extremely infrequent code releases. BSD license. 2003 Review
gwm	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	2.0	20050328	20100218	Colas Nahaboo (v1?), Anders Holst (v2)	"Generic" WM, slight release gap between v1.8 in 1995 and v2.0 in 2005 ... "It is based upon a WOOL (Window Object Oriented Langage) kernel, which is an interpreted dialect of Lisp with specific window management primitives." 2.0 is a complete rewrite. Website goes down occasionally.
GwML	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	11	20061003	20100214	Fabrice Le Fessant	Inspired by gwm (Generic Window Manager), written in and configured using Objective CAML (OCAML). Experimental, "may never get past Alpha." GwML is mainly a side project to go with the editor Efuns. The bulk of the package is themes, and it includes the entire of the ICCCM. If you can find it: it may have vanished 200909.
HackedBox	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.8.5	20070120	20100218	Larry Owen	Modified/simplified Blackbox. Most notably, the toolbar and slit were removed. 2003 Review
Haydar Desktop Environment	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	2.0.3	20080322	20100311	Haydar Alkaduhimi	"HDE is an open source desktop environment for Linux/Unix Operating Systems ... hde2 has many new f[ea]tures such as transparency, glow, tooltip screensh[o]ts and emulating the look and feel of windows vista ... The only need for hde2 is Qt4 and XOrg ( or XFree86 )."
HaZe	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	not available			argonaut_@yahoo.com	mlvwm (Macintosh-8/9-alike) modified - very black and white. Homepage died with Geocities in late 2009.
heliwm	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	1.13	20060303	20100218	Hidetoshi Ohtomo	Intended to be extremely small and light ("to save electricity consumption"). No virtual desktops. 2003 Review
i3	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	3.d-bf1	20091221	20100228	Michael Stapelberg	Developed because the author was unsatisfied with wmii. Tiling WM, revised BSD license.
IceWM	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	1.2.37	20090125	20100202	Originally Marko Macek, also Mathias Hasselmann.	Written (in C++) to emulate OS/2 and Windows 95/98, but it's grown. Themeable and has virtual desktops. 2003 Review
Integrity	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	1.0	20040808	20100221	Jason Athey	QT-based. As of 20081004 the index.php page is displaying only the entry page and won't show downloads or anything else. For the source: http://sourceforge.net/projects/integrity/.
Interface	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.2.5	20030914	20100221	Ian Mondragon	Written in Objective C for GNUstep.
Ion	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	3-20090110	20090110	20100202	Tuomo Valkonen	Keyboard-driven framing tabbed WM. Successor to PWM. 2003 Review
JD4X	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.6	20060201	20100221	Tay Hock Keong, Brandon Tay, Joseph Gledhill, Marc Patteet, Christopher R.	Java Desktop for X. Meant for Java programmers. Written in a mix of Java and C.
Jewel	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.12.40	20020823	20100221	MJ Ray	A spin-off of aewm++/Sapphire (thus the name), this is also written in C++. They started to try to rewrite it in Objective C as well, but that doesn't appear to have materialized.
JoyWM	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.2.2	20070930	20100221	mfranke@dulug.de	Was LMMS, "Linux MultiMedia System," Renamed 200709. Intended as a way of accessing photos, audio, video, etc. on a limited screen with a joystick. "... a GUI written in pygame ..."
JWM	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	2.0.1	20070704	20100214	Joe Wingbermuehle	Joe's WM - young, buggy, similar to IceWM and Windows 98.
Kahakai	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.6.2	20040207	20100311	Eugene Pervago, Nick Wesch, Daniel Brown, Michael Brailsford, Alex Earl, Faugn, Hyriand, Jeff Hughes.	Fork of Waimea with scripting added. Discontinued, followed by Aegis.
Karmen	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.15	20081228	20100222	Johan Veenhuizen	"There is no configuration file and no library dependencies other than Xlib. The input focus model is click-to-focus. Karmen aims at ICCCM and EWMH compliance."
KDE	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	4.4.0	20100209	20100228		KDE (unlike its best known competitor) does include a Window Manager, kwm. Famous, big, pretty.
larswm	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	not available		20100225	Lars Bernhardsson	Keyboard-driven, minimalist, auto-tiling (the first?). Based on 9wm. Includes Xinerama support. Website died ~200910.
LMMS					mfranke@dulug.de	"Linux MultiMedia System." "LMMS is a project trying to create a gui for TV that can be used with a gamepad/joystick. In future there shall be various applications for playing audiofiles ... and videofiles ..." As of 200709 this project has been renamed JoyWM.
Looking Glass 3D	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	1.0.1	20080222	20100302	Colin M. Bullock, Christian Ost, David Weizades, Deron Johnson, Van der Haegen Mathieu, Kirk Turner, Giordano Fracasso, Hideya Kawahara, Krishna Gadepalli, Juan González, Paul Byrne, Phil Dowell, Pierre Ducroquet, Radek Kierner.	3D desktop environment written in Java. Declared "practically dead" 200909. Has claimed in the past to be GPL but licensing is very unclear. Sponsored by Sun. Binary packages and CVS. Never passed early beta. See also this project page.
Lucca WM	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.1.2	20080422	20100311	Vincent Povirk	MIT license tiling WM intended for GNOME. Written in C, requires GTK and XLib.
lwm	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	1.2.2	20091124	20100313	Originally Elliott Hughes. Maintenance by James Carter.	"Lightweight" WM, fairly minimal decorations.
Luminocity	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	?		20100222		Modification of Metacity. Discontinued in favour of Compiz/Beryl? May still be possible to pull out of repositories using GNOME's JHBuild.
LXP	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.2-1d	20070208	20100222	Manuel Carrasco	Not a WM. "LXP is a desktop enviroment identical to Windows XP. LXP is a collection of different pieces of GNU software (IceWM, xfe, idesk, etc) modified in order to look and feel identical to Windows XP."
maewm	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	not available		20100225		Hack of aewm. Info and homepage from xwinman.org. URL says "access denied" (and has since 200704), but is the only one available.
Manix	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	git		20100203	Magnus Sjöstrand	Mac OS 8/9-alike. Radical change of website ~200903, and went from v0.6 to git only. Needs SCons (and git of course) to build. Activity ceased around 200903?
Matchbox	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	1.2	20070413	20100311	Matthew Allum	Intended for handhelds and very small screens. Includes more or less a full desktop package. Runs on the Nokia Internet Tablets, the OLPC, and the OpenMoko phone. 2003 Review
mavosxwm	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.2.1	20030221	20100303	Martin Vollrathson	No connection to OS X despite name. Based on wm2. As of 200808 the front page won't link to the downloads, but check this sourceforge link.
Maxx Interactive Desktop	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	DR3	20090713	20100302	Eric Masson	Similar to the proprietary Silicon Graphics IRIX 4Dwm, this WM was previously called 5dwm. Appears to have a license agreement with SGI. Restricted license: "... MaXX Desktop [may be] executed ONLY on ... x86, x86_64 and ia64."
Metacity	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	2.28.1	20100126	20100305	"GNOME Team"	"Boring window manager for the adult in you. Many window managers are like Marshmallow Froot Loops; Metacity is like Cheerios." (the developers.) Doesn't do much without GNOME. See also this not-a-homepage. 2003 Review
Metisse	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.4.1	20081209	20100305	Olivier Chapuis, Nicolas Roussel	Very pretty psuedo-3D effects, testbed WM based on FVWM 2.5.x. Brought forward by Mandriva spring 2007. Requires its own modified X server ("nucleo"). A lot of reading and compiling is called for: I was unable to get it (v0.4.0-rc4) to work myself. Active work continues in 2009.
Mezzo	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	2008.1	20080417	20100202	Ryan Quinn	Part of Symphony OS, a modification of fvwm that runs on a modified(?) Ubuntu.
MID4Linux						"Mass Interactive Desktop for Linux," another name for 5Dwm which imitates the Irix Magic Desktop. See MaXX Interactive Desktop, the new name for 5Dwm.
miwm	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	1-1	20030709	20100202	Ben Paul Wise	"Microscopic" WM, written in C++, "incorporating lessons from lwm, awm, wmx, Blackbox, and UDE. Example code was lifted from awm, lwm and wmx, but also rather extensively re-written."
mlvwm	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.9.1	20000627	20100222	Takahashi Hasegawa	Macintosh like virtual WM. (The website is so old it uses the <blink> tag.)
Monkey WM	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.3	20071107	20100311	Chris Tillberg	GPL, written in Freepascal. The author took hints from sWM and WindowLab.
Mosquito	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.5.43	20011206	20100305	erth7411 at csd dot uu dot se	C++, garish colours. Website has been significantly stripped ~200804.
Multi-Cursor Window Manager	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	1.0	20060310	20100223	Grant Wallace et al	Supports multiple simultaneous users. Based on IceWM.
MPWM	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	git		20100305	Peter Hutterer	Part of the "Multi-Pointer X Server" project: "As of May 27 2008, MPX is part of the standard X.org X Window System implementation." MPWM is a proof-of-concept WM that he makes available.
Musca	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.9.24	2009110	20100312	Sean Pringle	Tiling WM, borrows from Ratpoison and dwm, uses dmenu for menuing. Wikipedia says "Musca ... is one of the minor southern constellations." The author has borrowed their image of the star map, so I guess that's what he had in mind.
Mutter	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	none yet		20100305		I don't usually include plans and innuendo, but this is relatively big. GNOME is working toward a version of Metacity with Clutter support ("Mutter"). Doesn't exist in any usable form yet.
MWM	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.95.2	20090527	20100313	"Hungry Programmers"	M*tif WM re-implemented by the Hungry Programmers - part of the Lesstif package. 2003 Review
NovaWM	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	Alpha-0.8	20021225	20100222	"realmz"	Looks like it takes its hints from Blackbox?
miNimalistic WM	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	2008100200	20081008	20100222	Adam Tla/lka	Based on evilwm and aewm, GPL.
olvwm	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	4.4.3.2p1.4-25		20100225	Scott Oaks	Emulates Sun olwm with virtual desktops. Website went 404 between 20081213 and 20090131. Version shown is available in Debian testing (available for i386 but not for amd64).
olwm	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	3.2p1.4-25		20100225	Sun Microsystems (many patches applied since public release).	Sun olwm. No homepage(?), available with some distros. While this appears to be copyrighted by Sun and not GPL, Linux programmers are maintaining it? Debian testing package listed.
OmegaWM	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.2.1	20050413	20100222	Hyriand	The author, "Hyriand," also worked on Kahakai. Requires SConstruct, Cairo, ImLib2.
Openbox	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	3.4.10	20100107	20100131	Mikael Magnusson, Dana Jansens, Derek Foreman, Tore Anderson, Audun Hove, Marius Nita, et al.	Based on Blackbox, standards-compliant, fast, works with GNOME and KDE.
Orion	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.2	20040524	20100225	David Frese, Norbert Freudemann.	Written in scsh. Similar behaviour to Ion. Still mentioned at the scsh pages: some or all links to the WM itself are periodically broken.
OroboROX	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.9.7.9	20050829	20100215		A modification of Oroborus intended for the ROX Desktop. Stability problems caused 0.9.7.10 and 0.9.8 to be discarded in favour of the older 0.9.7.9. Download site vanished roughly ~200912.
Oroborus	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	2.0.20	20100215	20100305	orig. Ken Lynch, later Stefan Pfetzing.	Minimalist, includes utilities to bind keys and launch applications.
Parti	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.0.6	20090322	20100202	Nathaniel Smith	'Parti is a tabbing/tiling (one might say "partitioning") window manager. Its goal is to bring this superior window management interface to modern, mainstream desktop environments. It is written in Python, uses GTK+ ...' Alpha.
PAWM	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	2.2.9	20060907	20100307	David Gómez Espinosa, Raúl Núñez de Arenas Coronado.	Puto Amo Window Manager. Small.
PekWM	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.1.11	20090516	20100307	Claes Nästén	Based on aewm++ with window grouping like PWM and Fluxbox. I rather like this WM.
PerlWM	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.0.7	20040523	20100202	Rich Williams(?)	Written in Perl. Not very stable or usable.
Phluid	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.0.3	20001113	20100225	Matthew M. Elder	Declared dead by developer 200304. Used Imlib2, aimed for ICCCM compliance. BSD License.
piewm	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	1.04	20060314	20100203		tvtwm modified to use pie menus - an early rudimentary implementation of mouse gestures.
Pixie	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.1	20091103	20100313	Johan "Owl" Ceuppens	Not currently a window manager - and may never be. It's a library for creating WMs.
PLWM	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	2.6a	20040407	20100203	Peter Liljenberg	"Pointless Window Manager." Written in Python. "This is not a window manager for non-programmers" (Freshmeat comment). No decorations. It is both a set of classes for implementing a WM, and a WM.
Puppet	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.3	20080213	20100203	Stephen Tse, Roman Kennke	The (minimalist, no decorations) WM for the Escher Java Library for X Windows, downloaded as a part of Escher. Version number is for Escher.
PWM	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	20070720	20070720	20100203	Tuomo Valkonen	"The first tabbing window manager." The author moved on to Ion: the version shown here is v1. Ion can also be compiled to behave like PWM, and these are v2 and v3. 2003 Review
PycaWM	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.2	20090301	20100203	Vincent Rasneur, Anaëaut;l Verrier.	Written in Python. GPLv3.
Pyro Desktop	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.1	20070718	20100203	Alex Graveley	A Firefox extension that turns the browser into a window manager and web desktop. "Works better with Firefox 3.0." 0.2-pre-release can completely replace your WM (with Firefox). Their website doesn't make it clear: you need a compositing window manager or this will not work. Even with it, it worked very poorly on my machine.
PyWM	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.1-1-a4-1	20060417	20100203	orig. David Mcnab, now Elmo Mäntynen.	A modification of FLWM scriptable in Python. Author says it's a very early version.
qlwm	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	4.3	20080821	20100225	Alexander Linden	Based on Qt, written in C++. Window decorations are Fluxbox-like. Switches readily between traditional, tiling, and full screen modes. I quite like it, but it has heavy memory demands because of its use of Qt (if you use GNOME or KDE already this will hardly be an issue for you). Review of 4.1.
Qtile	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.1	20080831	20100203	Aldo Cortesi	Written in Python, tiling, screenshot suggests strong similarities to wmii/dwm. Early unstable alpha. Not GPL, © by author, free to use.
quarkwm	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	3_200710022054	20071002	20100214	FC	Keyboard-driven, some similarities to Ratpoison. The source code appears to be totally uncommented.
qvwm	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	1.1.12	20020217	20100313	Kenichi Kourai	Windows 95-alike. Written from scratch in C++. Many of the download links are broken, but there was still one valid one when I last checked. There is a more recent version (20070430) modified by a couple other authors at sourceforge (20070430) - I don't know the provenance of this version. 2003 Review
Ratpoison	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	1.4.5	20090712	20100225	Shawn Betts	Tiling keyboard-driven minimalist WM with emacs- and screen-like key bindings. 2003 Review
rio	[homepage] [Freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	20100203	20100203	20100203	Russ Cox	Derived from 9wm, and intended to be more like Bell's original Rio. Wikipedia article relates to Bell Lab's Plan 9's original rio, but mentions this one. To get the source you have to search links to download the whole of "Plan 9 From User Space" (plan9port, 20+MB). The date I give is for the most recent release of plan9port.
ROX Desktop	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]			20100228		Not a WM: ROX is a file manager imitating the RISC OS GUI that manages your desktop on top of a WM (currently OroboROX).
s3d	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.2.1.1	20090711	20100209	Simon Wunderlich	s3d "is a 3d network display server which can be used as 3d desktop enviroment." Not currently easy to build (v0.2.1.1).
Sapphire	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	not available		20100307	Frank Hale	"Sapphire" and aewm++ are different variants of the same project by the same author, but development on Sapphire has stopped. The homepage appears deliberately blank since ~200706? 2003 Review
Sawfish	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	1.6.2	20100216	20100228		Formerly titled "sawmill." Highly scriptable through a LISP derivative. Was for some time the WM of GNOME. Dead 2003-2006, now in active development again.
screen	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	4.0.3	20080807	20100307	Originally Oliver Laumann, more recently Wayne Davison, Juergen Weigert and Michael Schroeder.	Screen is a text-based application that multiplexes a terminal between applications.
scrotwm	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.9.22	20100111	20100307	Marco Peereboom, Ryan Thomas McBride, Darrin Chandler	"... largely inspired by xmonad and dwm," borrows code from dwm, written in C. Tiling. ISC license. Source is CVS, version listed is their numbering of a snapshot.
scwm	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.99.6.2	20000312	20100203	Greg J. Badros, Maciej Stachowiak, et al.	"Scheme Constraints" WM. Configurable with a Guile Scheme language.
SithWM	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	1.2.3	20080425	20100215	Øyvind Røtvold	"Keyboard-driven," "minimalist." Based on evilwm: different (better, in my view) key bindings, new menu, functionality.
SkatOSWM	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	1.0	20050113	20100307	Bodo Giannone	"SkatOSWM is a very small window manager which centers all new windows on the screen. This is the only supported feature. Perhaps it is very oversized to even name it a window manager..." Currently (20090211) site is down.
Spook	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	?	?	20100209	Nick Welch	By the author of tinywm and whimsy. X/MIT license. Written in C++, based on aewm. Sounded interesting, but: "The thing runs and works with few crashes/etc., but it's not even worthy of calling alpha" and he's declared it abandoned. Code infrequently (never?) available from repository.
Stumpwm	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.9.6	20090804	20100309	Shawn Betts?	Tiling (similarities to Ratpoison) minimalist WM. Requires a lisp environment (which uses as lot of memory), and a strong knowledge of lisp seems to be a pre-requisite. 2003 Review
subtle	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	Mercurial repository	?	20100307	Christoph Kappel	Tiling WM, behaviour based on Wily/ACME. Original code base was aewm, now fully rewritten. Configurable with Ruby (was Lua until about 200809).
Sugar	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]		?	20100309	"The OLPC Team"	Not a WM. The interface for the OLPC, written in Python. Runs on top of Matchbox. Seems to include instructions for building and using it on many distros. Fetch and build is done with jbuild, which obscures the current version, and it doesn't look easy.
swm	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	?	19930929	20100303	Tom LaStrange	Solbourne WM. First WM with a virtual desktop, 1989. Also had some session management. Homepage linked here points to an old tarball at xwinman.org which was bundled in 1993 but first put out to the public in 1989. The author, Tom LaStrange, previously wrote TWM.
sWM	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	1.3.4c	20040624	20100309	Robert Sperling	Small WM. Based on aewm, tries for ICCCM and GNOME compliance.
TAL/wm	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	not available		20100215	Nolan Liebert	"TAL/wm is a Tiling Application Launcher/window manager for X. Currently TAL/wm is based loosely on the dynamic window manager (dwm) code. The goal [was] to be even more minimal and equally as customizable." MIT License. Same author as dwemo and AntiWM. Author Nolan Liebert says he's not going to maintain TAL/wm "as I really don't think we need more forks of dwm anymore." Source code has vanished 200907.
TDE	[homepage] [freshmeat] [wikipedia]	1.3.2-1	20060808	20100223		Brazilian Portugese, "Techisa Desktop Environment." Screenshot shows something that looks rather like Windows XP. Most recent version isn't available as source (although the binary tarball includes the GPL), the previous version is.
tekwm	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	19891122	19891122	20100311	Glenn Widener	"Homepage" is an archive page at xwinman.org. Written for Tektronix equipment, based on awm.
TinyWM	[homepage] [freshmeat] [wikipedia]	1.3	20050310	20100309	Nick Welch	50 lines of C code, also available in Python. Also the author of Whimsy. Review
tmux	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	1.2	20100310	20100313	Nicholas Marriott	BSD-licensed, terminal multiplexer (ie. similar to "screen" but newer).
Toy'd	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	not available		20100309	Mathieu De Kermadec, Germain Gaudart, Kenfe-Mickael Laventure, Matthieu Martin, Arnaud Vallat, Laurent Malvert, Ting-Ann Lin	"Built on top of Aoof-Wm, an advanced object oriented framework ..." Meant to be portable across OSes. They don't seem to have much concrete to use yet. "There is no window manager yet, we are currently re-designing it." Rigor mortis has set in: the domain name is dead, no files available on current hosting.
treewm	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.4.5	20030915	20100209	Thomas Jäger	"The user can create desktops which can themselves contain windows and desktops." Not intuitive.
tritium	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.3.5	20080613	20100209	Mike O'Connor	"tritium is a tiling/tabbed window manager for the X Window System inspired by the Ion window manager. It was written completely from scratch in python and shares no actual code with Ion." Based on PLWM.
TrsWM	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.5.2	20040106	20100309	Yaroslav "Yarick" Rastrigin	Based on Ion, manage windows with the keyboard. Source tarball link broken (20080316), but you can download the source rpm and extract the tarball from that. 2003 Review
tsubasa	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.1	20070405	20100203	Nicolas Centa	"It is written in C++, mostly using safe programming techniques, uses midtalk and gtkmm." Plans to implement EWMH. "... tsubasa also includes mazeru, a program that is intended to become a compositing manager ... It is recommanded that you use Xephyr in order to test tsubasa, as it is not very stable at the moment."
tvtwm	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	patchlevel 11	19950209	20100203	Chris Ross, orig. Tom LaStrange	Tom's Virtual Tab WM (the virtual desktop is a viewport to one large area) version of TWM. The "homepage" listed is a direct link to a .tar.gz archive at X.org.
twin	[homepage] [freshmeat] [wikipedia]	0.6.1	20090217	20100309	Massimiliano Ghilardi	twin is a text-based WM for the console or terminal. I've had trouble getting it to compile and/or behave recently (2008), although I used to use it heavily.
Twindy	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	1.01	20090323	20100131	Niall Moody	"Inspired by Tracktion, the multitrack audio editor/sequencer." Version 1.00 was intended to be the "final," last release. 1.01 allows building on new systems, no new features. Review of previous version, 0.45b. Notes
TWM	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	1.0.4-2 (Debian testing)	20080615	20100208	Tom LaStrange	"Tom's" or "Tab" WM, although not tabbed in the modern sense of grouping. Old, usually very stable. Not developed, just maintained. Date and version are from Debian packages. 2003 Review
UDE	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.2.10	20100214	20100215	Christian Ruppert	Unix Desktop Environment. "uwm" package under Debian testing. Unusual design.
UnWimp	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	git only		20100222	Clive Crous	From one of the authors of EvilPoison. He said 'It "steals" concepts/ideas from treewm, Ratpoison and wmii to become what it will be.' Website has been very broken for months, possibly years.
uwm	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	?	19970213	20100215	Digital Equipment Corporation, M. Gancarz, Loretta Guarino Reid.	"Universal" WM, or "Ultrix" WM, depending on who you ask. "Very outdated, but is an excellent example of how to do simple window manager functions." Comment and source archive are from xwinman.org.
Velox	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.0.3	20100214	20100214	Michael Forney	Inspired by awesome, xmonad, dwm.
Vtwm	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	5.4.7	20050628	20100215	Tom LaStrange et al.	Extends TWM with a large (single) virtual desktop - like tvtwm. The snapshot file shows activity 200811.
VWM	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	2.1.3	20091104	20100303	Bryan Christ	Oh. My. God. There's competition for twin!!! "Viper Window Manager (VWM) is a lightweight, extensible window manager for the console." Lighter than twin, and works well (v1.2.0?).
w9wm	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.4.2	20041223	20100313	Benjamin Drieu. Based on David Hogan's 9wm.	Adds virtual desktops to 9wm. 2003 Review
Waimea	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.4.0	20021105	20100313	David Reveman	Some code from Blackbox but not a fork, eye candy added. There was some development in 2004, no stable code produced: newer homepage at freedesktop.org.
WeeWM	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.0.2	20030707	20100216	flashcode AT flashtux DOT org, xahlexx AT weeland DOT org, bounga AT altern DOT org.	Small, keyboard-oriented.
Whim	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	2399	20090419	20100313	George Peter Staplin	"Written in Tcl ... utilizes Tk, and optionally Tile." It seems to build it you need to download "megapkg," and version numbers and dates are sometimes from that package, sometimes from a Whim package. It is apparently able to run on the Nokia N770.
Whimsy	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.1a1	20080713	20100309	Nick Welch	"Whimsy is a highly hackable window manager written in Python. It is currently in a alpha phase and is marginally suitable for use." By the author of TinyWM. Licence is "public domain."
Wily	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.13.42	20060406	20100203	Steve Kilbane, Tommy Pettersson, Ozan S. Yigit ("current keeper").	Wily is, strictly speaking, an editor - an implementation of ACME from Plan 9. Arguably it's also a WM in a box, although it only manages child windows of its own, not other programs. But even if it isn't a "window manager," it's been quite influential of several other WMs. (Yes, this is a strange inclusion.)
wimpwm	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.1.1	20011021	20100209	Martin Grabmüller	Limited decorations, small. Requires Sizzle Scheme interpreter. "... heavily inspired by aewm ... key bindings are taken from evilwm ... style of window resizing came from TWM."
Window Manager From Scratch (WMFS)	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	git		20100208	Martin Duquesnoy (code), Marc Lagrange (build system "and other")	"The goal of this project is to make a very basic, lightweight and dynamic WM." Tiling, BSD license, not currently stable.
WindowLab	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	1.39	20091227	20100228	Nick Gravgaard	Based in part on 9wm and partly inspired by the Amiga Workbench. No virtual desktops, apparently not Xinerama-aware. 2003 Review
Window Maker	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.92.0	20050703	20100222	Alfredo Kojima, Dan Pascu.	Emulates NeXT's GUI. 2003 Review
Wizard Desktop	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	20090814	20090814	20100313	Andrew Waidler	Tabbed and tiling, based on awesome and Ion, written with Java Swing and GPL-licensed. Status is "pre-Alpha." 20100128: opt files available, but no actual WM??
wm2	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	4	19970321	20100311	Chris Cannam	Minimalist but looks great - unusual. With vertical title bars. If you want virtual desktops, see wmx. 2003 Review
wmG	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.15.0	19991125	20100311	Scott "Reeve" Barnes	Intended to work with (a very old version of) GNOME. "This project is abandoned." Follow the "Source" link at the site as there's none on the Sourceforge link.
WMI	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	10	20041003	20100222	Anselm R. Garbe	"Window Manager Improved", spawned wmii and dwm. Development has ceased. The "homepage" listed here is the suckless.org "misc" download folder, where an "historical" version is available.
wmii	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	3.6 3.9b1	20091022	20100203	orig. Anselm R. Garbe, Kris Maglione - maintainer.	"Window Manager Improved 2". Primarily keyboard driven, tries to remain small. A personal favourite, but does not and will not include Xinerama. Or so it said until 200711 - but no code has materialized to accompany their change of heart.
wmx	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	7	20090109	20100311	Chris Cannam	Adds virtual desktops to wm2. For long-time users, v7 may break old menus, but is much easier to compile (v6pl1 was from 2001). 2003 Review Notes
wwm	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	2.0	19990212	20100223	Jörg Czeranski	Weird WM. Was intended as a OS prototype rather than a WM, and appears abandoned.
XD640	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.3.1-1	20051120	20100312	Jean-Marc Lienher	"Lightweight desktop environment and office suite ... Warning: This project is still in early development stage! ... XD640 is a simple graphical desktop environment for X-Window. The goal is to create a set of light weight and fast applications running on a slow computer (i486 66MHz 16MB) and on a small screen (640x480), released under the BSD license." Based on fltk.
XFast	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.9	20080707	20100223	"oxygenic"	Incorporates a window server and manager in one, intended for embedded systems. Forked from Xynth.
xfwm	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	4.6.1	20090419	20100313	Olivier Fourdan	WM for the XFCE project. "XFCE" once stood for "XForms Common Environment," as its behaviour was derived from that of Sun's CDE. 2003 Review
XIGE	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.1.2 beta	20060105	20100216	Juan Jose Medina Olarte	From xwinman.org: "Xilicius Graphical Environment is ... optimized for programmers, laptops and fast users." Based on ideas from lwm and ACME, the Plan 9 editor/environment. The URL has been known to go away for long periods.
XMonad	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.9	20091025	20100203	Spencer Janssen, Don Stewart, Jason Creighton.	Rewrite and extension of dwm in Haskell. Includes Xinerama (which dwm does not). Tiling, keyboard-oriented. Haskell is a pain to install and work with under Debian. Recent versions of xmonad will rebuild themselves if you change the config file.
XPde	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.5.1	20040821	20100313	José León, Zeljan Rikalo, Jens Kühner, Valery Gabrusev.	XP-alike for Linux. "Desktop environment." Written in Kylix (discontinued proprietary Pascal variant).
XSWM	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	1.1	20040826	20100216	Marco Castelvecchio	"eXtreme Speed WM," based on evilwm, appears to add OSD and not much else. Download link is broken (200812), but go to sourceforge and search and you'll find it.
XTags	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.5	20080420	20100203	Claudio M. Alessi	Keyboard-driven, "implements tags for X11." Intended to be used with dvtm ... and no other WM. Interesting idea.
XWEM	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	CVS		20100223	Evgeny Zajcev (main), Richard Klinda, Alex Ott, Didier Verna, Steve Youngs.	"... XWEM is written entirely in Emacs Lisp and runs in XEmacs." Tiling. Yes, makes XEmacs your window manager. There was an xwem.org domain, but it lapsed: the site listed above seems to predate that, and may not have been updated in years.
Xynth	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.10.82	20090417	20100128	Alper Akcan	X server replacement and desktop environment for embedded environment. LGPL. XFast is a GPL fork of this. There appears to be ongoing work on the project. Domain xynth.org dropped unceremoniously 200908.
YAWM	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	not available		20100208		Found at xwinman.org: "in an early state of development, [YAWM] aims to be portable, intuitive and fast." yawm.org was for sale, then dead, now (200810) purchased with holding page. yawm.sourceforge.net was empty until approx. 200810, now has a name and no files.
YeahWM	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.3.5	20041125	20100216	knorke_at_phrat.de	Based on evilwm and aewm with mildly BeOS-like appearance.
ZDE	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.0.5	20060419	20100216	Thomas Coppi	"Zeta Desktop Environment." Window manager plus a couple tools. Version number is "zimwm". Objective C and Perl. Author considers it alpha.
ZWM	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	1.0.0	20020208	20100128	Nils Gladitz	"First ZWM code release," now quite old. SDL-based.