Up to WM Report

The Comprehensive List of Window Managers for Unix

This is a list of every freely available Window Manager and compositor I'm aware of (roughly 180 in 2011, about 287 in 2024). 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).

I'm adding non-English WMs, with the caveat that English is the only language I speak. Non-English projects may not have version number listings.

Recent adds (that doesn't mean they're new WMs): niri (2024-01-29), Vivarium (2023-12-07), SwayFX (2023-12-07), Matchbox 2 (2023-11-02), Weston (2023-10-24), Hyprland (2023-10-24), hikari (2023-10-22), labwc (2023-10-20), waybox (2023-10-20), Strata (2023-10-20).

Most recent updates: 2024-03-17 07:43

URLs Version Release
Date
Date
Checked
Authors Notes

Name Display URLs Version Release date Download Link Date checked Authors Notes
2bwm X11 [homepage] git 20240103 20240203 Patrick "Venam" Louis "A fast floating WM written over the XCB library and derived from mcwm."
2wm X11 [homepage] X not available Anselm Garbe

"Stereo WM." Stripped/simplified version of dwm, same author. Reasonably thorough documentation. The "homepage" given is the suckless.org git repository. 2wm has periodically disappeared in the past. Gone 2018-01.

Original homepage. Local archived (2007) copy.

3Dwm X11 not available Niklas Elmqvist, Robert Karlsson. One of the earliest attempts at 3D appearance in a WM. Site died mid-2010, there had been no development for quite a while.
5Dwm X11 Eric Masson See MaXX Interactive Desktop.
9wm X11 [homepage]
[Wikipedia]
1.4.2 20220120 20240212 originally David Hogan, now Neale Pickett and others 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.
adwm X11 [homepage] 0.7.16 20220128 20240229 Brian Bidulock "Advanced Dynamic Window Manager." "This was originally a fork of Echinus which in turn was a fork of dwm, and borrows concepts from velox, awesome, spectrwm and wmii." ie. it's a tiling WM.
Aegis X11 [homepage] X not available Michael Brailsford Child of Kahakai, based on aewm++. Code only available through SVN. Vanished summer 2014, former URL http://aegiswm.berlios.de/.
aewm X11 [homepage] X not available Decklin Foster A very popular code base for many other WMs. 2003 Review. Removed from red-bean.com ~2019-11. Still available pre-compiled in some distros in 2020.
aewm++ X11 not available 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++. 20100706 onward: source access at google currently broken. 2003 Review
AfterStep X11 [homepage]
[Wikipedia]
2.2.12 20130610 20240308 Sasha Vasko "Originally based on the look and feel of the NeXTStep interface."
AHWM X11 [homepage] git 20100901 20240316 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 X11 [homepage] 0.2.6 20080228 20240205 server: Dennis Felsing, client: Andreas Waidler. Ajax-based WM that runs entirely in a browser. Currently in alpha state and runs only in Firefox.
Alopex X11 [homepage] git 20190812 20240213 Jesse "Trilby/TrilbyWhite" McClure Tiling, cites tinywm, dwm, i3 and monster as inspiration. ArchWiki documentation. GPL3 license.
AlloyWM X11 not available Last known address http://www.phatboydesigns.net/alloywm/ is now advertising space. Was a modification of aewm.
alpt-wm X11 [homepage] X not available Andrea "AlpT" Lo Pumo "This is my custom, window manager. It's small, functional and fast. It is based on dwm ..." 2012-12: now subject to a bad domain redirect. 2013-03: author still has web presence, no mention of WM.
amaterus X11 [homepage] X not available 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 X11 [homepage] 0.22pl2 20230416 20240214 Marcus Comstedt Imitates the Amiga Workbench. Has its own "Generic amiwm License." Releases in 1998, 2010-07, and 2023-06. This site may be of interest to fans.
Anarchy X11 [homepage] X not available 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/).
anion3 X11 [homepage] X not available orig. Tuomo Valkonen. Now Sergej Pupykin. Fork of the dead Ion3. Tiling. Now "deprecated" (~201107) in favour of notion.
Antico X11 [homepage] git 20090525 20240214 previously listed as "Peppino", repo owner Giuseppe "antico" Cigala (2019-07-20) Qt4 window manager, trying to avoid other dependencies. Development appears to have ceased in 2009.
AntiRight X11 [homepage] 3.10 20100903 20240221 Jeffrey E. Bedard aka "GUIShell." 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 X11 [homepage] 0.0.5 20090531 20240216 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. Notes
Athene Desktop Edition X11 [homepage] X not available 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." Site dead 201011.
awesome X11 [homepage] [Wikipedia] 4.3 20190128 20240204 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, very active. Notes
awm X11 [homepage]
[Wikipedia]
2pl9 19951114 20240223 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 [in ~2010]." Based on uwm. "Homepage" link is to a recent (2023) GitHub post of the source.
B4Step X11 [homepage] 2.2 20010627 20240226 Eric Boucher Free to use, but not GPL. He supplies only binaries that are now twenty years old. Mash-up of Mac OS 8/9, GNOME, and OPENSTEP? Shaped windows. Version number and date is for Intel/RH 7.1 binary. Website straight outta 2001.
BadWM X11 [homepage] 0.1.1 20040915 20240205 Robert Annessi Website: "Not actively maintained." Minimalist, no decorations.
Berry X11 [homepage] 0.1.12 20221024 20240221 Joshua Ervin "bite-sized window manager" written in C. "Controlled via a powerful command-line client, allowing users to control windows via a hotkey daemon such as sxhkd or expand functionality via shell scripts."
Beryl X11 [Wikipedia] X 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. Now merged back to the Compiz project.
Blackbox X11 [homepage]
[Wikipedia]
0.77 20210512 20240222 Brad Hughes, then Jeff Raven, now Sean Shaleh Perry. One of the mainstays of the alternative WM world. Fluxbox, Openbox and many others are based on this. Old page died 2018-03: Arch Linux maintenance branch (linked above) is now the main release. 2003 Review
Bluetile X11 [homepage] 0.6 20111126 20240205 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. BSD3 license.
BrainTop X11 [homepage] X not available Roberto "MadBob" Guido Part of the "Lobotomy" project. The window manager "BrainTop" is a derivative of, and very similar to, XFCE's WM. Site dead 201308.
bspwm X11 [homepage] git 20230829 20240223 Bastien "baskerville" Dejean "Tiling window manager based on binary space partitioning." I haven't had time to figure out what that means ... But it came recommended.
Byobu text [homepage]
[Wikipedia]
5.133 20200217 20240210 Dustin Kirkland, Nick Barcet, Raphaël Pinson, Derek Carter Originally an enhancement for GNU Screen, Byobu is now a text-based window manager and terminal multiplexer that also works with tmux. Written in Python for Ubuntu, now works with most Linux distros, plus BSD and Mac.
cagebreak Wayland [homepage] 2.3.1 20240127 20240205 "project-repo" on GitHub "A Wayland Tiling Compositor Inspired by Ratpoison." MIT license.
catwm X11 [homepage] git 20230712 20240210 "pyknite" Tiling WM for Arch Linux, written in C, related to dwm. Discussion at this Arch Linux Forum. After no activity since 2011, updated 2023-07.
Cinnamon X11 [homepage]
[Wikipedia]
6.0.4 20240104 20240210 A UI, not a WM, a GNOME Shell variant meant to emulate GNOME 2 for those who don't like GNOME 3. Uses the Muffin WM.
Clementine X11 [homepage] 0.0.7 beta 20020325 20240228 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 X11 [homepage] 1212 20121207 20240228 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.
Common Desktop Environment X11 [homepage]
[Wikipedia]
2.5.2 20231118 20240213 CDE was released in 1993. It had a long history, and was often imitated. In 2012, it and the supporting Motif toolkit were open-sourced. As of 2018 it's still build-it-yourself, no packages.
Compiz X11 [homepage]
[Wikipedia]
0.9.14.2 20220822 20240304 Attractive and graphics-intensive. Beryl forked from Compiz, they re-merged 2007 to form Compiz Fusion, became just "Compiz" again early 2011.
Compiz Fusion X11 [homepage] X
[Wikipedia]
not available "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." Now merged back to Compiz.
Cortile X11 [homepage] 2.4.0 20240301 20240317 "leukipp" "... auto tiling manager with hot corner support for ..." many window managers. This isn't a complete window manager (but it is a WM), it adds dynamic tiling to many floating WMs.
CTWM X11 [homepage]
[Wikipedia]
4.1.0 20230326 20240304 Previously Claude Lecommandeur, now Richard Levitte. Adds virtual desktops and even more configurability to TWM. One of my main WMs for years, although less so recently. 2003 Review
cwm X11 [homepage] 7.4 20231016 20240222 Marius Aamodt Eriksen, taken over by Lea Neukirchen Originally based on evilwm, now written from scratch. Disappeared in 2015, rediscovered (new maintainer) late 2019. OpenBSD had a copy - older than the "homepage" link, but the first linked one is portable.
dminiwm X11 [homepage] git 20141224 20240216 "moetunes"

Based on catwm, itself based on dwm. Minimalist tiling WM. Spawned monsterwm. The author has several variants by different names with slightly different functionality.

Deep Space Window Manager X11 [homepage] git 20161117 20240226 Alexander "cosmonaut" Vynnyk Based on StumpWM (written in Lisp). "Better usability, better integration with Emacs." Project frozen (2016-11) with the intent of merging back to StumpWM.
dvtm X11 [homepage] 0.15 20160109 20240225 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 X11 [homepage] 0.0.2 20080517 20240204 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, look for "OldFiles".
dwl Wayland [homepage] 0.5 20231125 20240305 Devin J. Pohly "dwl is a compact, hackable compositor for Wayland based on wlroots. It is intended to fill the same space in the Wayland world that dwm does in X11 ..."
dwm X11 [homepage]
[Wikipedia]
6.4 20221004 20240223 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.
dwm-ipc X11 [homepage] 1.5.7 20201106 20240225 Mihir "mihirlad55" Lad "A DWM patch that allows IPC communication through a UNIX socket."
E16 X11 [homepage] 1.0.29 20231029 20240308 The Enlightenment team "E16 is predecessor of the current ... Enlightenment ..." I don't usually like to keep separate entries on particular revs, but Enlightenment E16 has been particularly popular and well (and separately) maintained.
echinus wm X11 [homepage] 0.4.9 20110920 20240219 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." The git repo (but not the web page) says it's not maintained anymore and a comment on the page says "I use cwm ..."
Eclipse X11 [homepage] not available Nikos Drakos, Ross Moore, Erik Enge ... A WM, not the well known IDE. Written in Common Lisp, student programming project. Pointer to CVS snapshot tarball is broken, CVS itself was available, now gone. Abandoned, succumbing to link rot.
EDE X11 [homepage] 2.1 20140621 20240313 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 X11 [homepage] not available Serdar Özler. Turkish. Written in C++. Site died 200908.
eggwm X11 [homepage] 0.2 20110212 20240226 José Expésito

alt home. Written in C++, Qt4 libraries, GPLv3. freedesktop.org / EWMH / ICCCM compliant. Meant to be lightweight, standards-compliant, and eventually add gesture control. code.google.com is archived, live fork at https://github.com/xiangzhai/eggwm.

Elevate X11 [homepage] 0.2.0 20071118 20240223 Kostis Kapelonis Part of "Project Elevate" to simplify our complex UIs. Has a very long list or requirements, was in development for years, now abandoned?
Enlightenment Wayland/X11 [homepage]
[Wikipedia]
0.26.0 20231223 20240226 Orig. Geoff "Mandrake" Harrison and Carsten "Rasterman" Haitzler. Now a large team. Bringing you shaped windows, configurability, and heavy graphics since 2000. Originally based on fvwm 2. Big Samsung funding 2009-11. Version E17 dropped 2012-12 after a decade wait. This is a "Desktop Environment," not just a WM. Forks: E16, Moksha (E17). Supports both Wayland and X11?
EPIwm X11 [homepage] 0.5.6 20020110 20240223 Students at EPITA in France. "Small, fast, light." School project. Appears fairly themeable. Last developed in the age of the 80386 ...
euclid-wm X11 [homepage] 0.4.3 20131216 20240316 William Diem "... minimalist, tiling window manager ... easy-to-learn, vim-like key-bindings ... seeks to ... balance the ease of use common among automatic-layout tiling window manager with the flexibility of manual layout WMs." BSD license.
EvilPoison X11 [homepage] not available Clive Crous, Pasi Kallinen "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." Crous' projects vanish frequently (201009, 201011, 201101). 2012-02: Slashdot announced that Crous will be the head of Linux Game Publishing, 2014-10: WM vanished entirely.
evilwm X11 [homepage] 1.4.2 20221108 20240228 Ciaran Anscomb Minimalistic keyboard driven WM with vi- and nethack-like key bindings. 2003 Review
expocity X11 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 .
E2WM X11 [homepage] 1.4 20170214 20240214 Masashi Sakurai et al "Equilibrium Emacs Window Manager," tiling (?), GPL3.
Emacs X Window Manager (EXWM) X11 [homepage] 0.28 20231005 20240211 Chris (git: "ch11ng") Feng Makes Emacs your tiling Window Manager. (See also XWEM.) Written in Emacs Lisp.
EMWM X11 [homepage] 1.2 20240128 20240228 Alexander Pampuchin "Enhanced Motif Window Manager," based on the original MWM but with modern updates like UTF-8, Xft fonts, and multi-monitor. See also: MWM (Motif), MWM (Lesstif)
failsafewm X11 Bundled with swm. See swm.
Firebox X11 [homepage] not available Cyrille Bagard Written from scratch in C, inspired by Fluxbox, HackedBox, Blackbox, Enlightenment, and WindowLab, but particularly by Openbox and wmii. Site vanished ~201106. Notes
Fluxbox X11 [homepage]
[Wikipedia]
1.3.7 20150208 20240225 Henrik Kinnunen Child of Blackbox with built-in keybindings and the tabs from PWM, quite popular. A personal favourite. 2003 Review
FLWM X11 [homepage] 1.02 20060630 20240229 Bill Spitzak Vertical titlebars, inspired by (and codebase from) wm2. Requires fltk libraries by the same author. Version "0.25" (which appears to be newer) can be found in the linked git repo. Review.
FpcBol X11 [homepage] 2.0 beta 20100907 20240229 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 X11 [homepage] 0.1 20030421 20240229 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.
FrankenWM X11 [homepage] 1.0.23 / git 20200729 / 20211029 20240201 Robin "sulami" Schroer Tiling WM forked from monsterwm. Written in C, only configurable on compile.
fvwm 1 X11 [homepage]
[Wikipedia]
not available Robert Nation et al. Version 1 of this venerable WM remained available from their website for 20 years after its release, but is finally gone in mid-2016. See fvwm 2.
fvwm 2 X11 [homepage]
[Wikipedia]
2.7.0 20221020 20240304 Robert Nation et al. Flexible appearance and behaviour, and a very long history. Version 2.7.0 predates 2.6.4 considerably, don't know why. As of 202001 or earlier, this is in "maintenance mode" and version 3 is recommended. And as of 202403, version 2 is no longer supported. 2003 Review
fvwm 3 X11 [homepage] 1.0.9 20231202 20240304 Thomas Adam et al at GitHub Version 3 is a work-in-progress as I add it 2020-01. As of 2020-09 they're showing 1.0.x, which is promising.
fvwm95 X11 [homepage]
[Wikipedia]
2.0.43f 20030503 20240229 Hector Peraza fvwm 2 modified to look and act like Windows 95. Among the downloads there is also a (older) file called fvwm98.
fvwm-crystal X11 [homepage] 3.7.3 20220206 20240304 Maciej Delmanowski fvwm 2 dressed up to look and act even better. Requires a recent version of fvwm2. Different version tags are available on GitHub and SourceForge (nice going guys).
fwm X11 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 X11 [homepage] not available Sander Jansen "FOX Desktop", built using the FOX toolkit. The homepage listed here is the author's. No download is available - in fact, no mention of it is made at all anymore.
Gala X11 [homepage]
[Wikipedia]
7.1.3 20231109 20240307 A variant of Mutter used by Elementary OS. Looks hard to build outside of Elementary, but it's available as a Fedora package!
Glassomium X11 [homepage] 0.3 20121216 20240307 Piero Toffanin "... cross-platform web-based TUIO-enabled multi-touch window manager. ... runs everything in texture-mapped web browser windows so that you can focus on creating applications ..." C++, Apache license, large (0.3 src = 137MB - includes the Berkelium library, large parts of Angry Birds Rio, and a Windows Ruby installer).
GNOME Wayland/X11 [homepage]
[Wikipedia]
45.3 20240106 20240203 This is a Desktop Environment and NOT a Window Manager. They rely on other WMs, previously Enlightenment and Sawfish, now Metacity or Compiz.
goomwwm X11 [homepage] git 20150517 20240201 Sean Pringle "get out of my way, window manager!" Tiling, tagging, keyboard-driven. Same author as xoat.
Golem X11 [homepage] 0.0.6 20060301 20240304 Orig. Jordan DeLong, now Bruce Ashfield. Nice looking, once promising project, now apparently abandoned. BSD license. 2003 Review
gwm X11 [homepage] not available Colas Nahaboo (v1?), Anders Holst (v2) "Generic" WM. v1.8 in 1995 (permissive license), new author with v2.0 in 2005, complete rewrite (GPL). Uses "an interpreted dialect of Lisp with specific window management primitives." Website goes down occasionally. Look further down for a link to v2.1+ downloads. Some (older) documentation here.
GwML X11 [homepage] not available Fabrice Le Fessant Inspired by gwm (Generic Window Manager), written in and configured using Objective CAML (OCAML). "May never get past Alpha," GwML is a side project to go with the editor Efuns. Package vanished 200909, site dead 201111, pointing to author's site (which has broken links).
HackedBox X11 [homepage] not available Larry Owen Modified/simplified Blackbox. Most notably, the toolbar and slit were removed. Site died ~201310. 2003 Review
Haydar Desktop Environment X11 [homepage] 2.0.3 20080322 20240203 Haydar Alkaduhimi HDE closely emulates the appearance of Windows Vista. Depends on QT4. Another sourceforge page with rather different (older?) information.
HaZe X11 [homepage] 0.2 20010520 20240304 argonaut_@yahoo.com mlvwm (Macintosh-8/9-alike) modified - very black and white.
heliwm X11 [homepage] 1.13 20060303 20240304 Hidetoshi Ohtomo Intended to be extremely small and light ("to save electricity consumption"). No virtual desktops. 2003 Review
Herbstluftwm X11 [homepage] 0.9.5 20220716 20240305 Thorsten Wißmann 2011 Tiling WM borrowing ideas from i3, musca, xmonad, and wmii.
hikari Wayland [homepage] 2.3.3 20220113 20240211 Stacking Wayland compositor for FreeBSD and Linux.
howm X11 [homepage] git 20211007 20240305 Harvey Hunt "A lightweight, tiling X11 window manager that mimics vi by offering operators, motions and modes."
Hyprland Wayland [homepage] 0.35.0 20240204 20240223 GitHub: "Vaxry"/"vaxerski" "Hyprland is a highly customizable dynamic tiling Wayland compositor that doesn't sacrifice on its looks." BSD license, written in C++.
i3 X11 [homepage]
[Wikipedia]
4.23 20231029 20240313 Michael Stapelberg Developed because the author was unsatisfied with wmii. Tiling WM, revised BSD license.
IceWM X11 [homepage]
[Wikipedia]
3.4.6 20240307 20240313 Originally Marko Macek, then Mathias Hasselmann, now Brian Bidulock. Originally written (in C++) to emulate OS/2 and Windows 95/98, but it's grown. Themeable and has virtual desktops. 2003 Review
Integrity X11 [homepage] 1.0 20040808 20240307 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 X11 [homepage] 0.2.5 20030914 20240305 Ian Mondragon Written in Objective C for GNUstep.
Ion X11 [homepage]
[Wikipedia]
not available Tuomo Valkonen Keyboard-driven framing tabbed WM. Successor to PWM. Custom license based on LGPL. Read about the author at the Wikipedia entry ... following that, no more downloads at his site, the content is hosted elsewhere. Continued by notion. Site dead 20230711.
JBWM X11 [homepage] 1.63 20221216 20240308 Jeffrey E. "jefbed" Bedard / Alisa Bedard Uses the code base of aewm and ideas from evilwm to try to make a fast and lightweight WM.
JD4X X11 [homepage] 0.6 20060201 20240313 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. (Probably incredibly hard/impossible to build in 2022.)
Jewel X11 [homepage] 0.12.40 20020823 20240313 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 never materialized.
JoyWM X11 [homepage]
not available 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 ..." Page had been empty for a couple years, died 2011-10. Slightly more info, references the dead homepage.
JWM X11 [homepage]
[Wikipedia]
2.4.3 20221022 20240211 Joe Wingbermuehle Joe's WM - similar to IceWM and Windows 98. As of v2.3.6, license has switched to MIT. Lightweight, intended for low-power/older computers.
Kahakai X11 [homepage] 0.6.2 20040207 20240203 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 X11 [homepage] 0.15 20081228 20240317 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." Same author as the more recent Wind.
KDE Wayland/X11 [homepage]
[Wikipedia]
5.27.10 20231205 20240211 KDE (unlike its best known competitor) does include a Window Manager, kwin. Famous, big, pretty.
labwc Wayland [homepage] 0.7.0 20231222 20240210 Johan Malm et al "Labwc stands for Lab Wayland Compositor ... inspired by BunsenLabs and ArchLabs ... inspired by openbox."
larswm X11 [homepage]
[Wikipedia]
7.5.3 20040715 20240225 Lars Bernhardsson Keyboard-driven, minimalist, auto-tiling (the first?). Based on 9wm. Includes Xinerama support. Website died ~200910, this is a pointer to a mirror.
LeftWM X11 [homepage] 0.5.1 20231116 20240316 Lex "lex148" Childs Tiling WM, MIT license, written in Rust.
LMMS X11 not available 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 X11 [homepage]
[Wikipedia]
not available 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. Previously sponsored by Sun. Never passed early beta. Bad security certificate. Site dead 2012-04.
Liri OS Shell Wayland/X11 [homepage] git 20240119 20240316 the Liri team ... but primarily Pier Luigi ("plfiorini") Fiorini The (graphical) "shell" for Liri OS. May not be buildable without that: requires at least Qt and Wayland.
Lucca WM X11 [homepage] 0.1.2 20080422 20240203 Vincent Povirk MIT license tiling WM intended for GNOME. Written in C, requires GTK and XLib.
lwm X11 [homepage] 1.2.4 20160212 20240204 Originally Elliott Hughes. Maintenance by James Carter. "Lightweight" WM, fairly minimal decorations.
Luminocity X11 [homepage] ? 2005? 20240316 Modification of Metacity. Discontinued in favour of Compiz/Beryl? I don't think there's any code to be downloaded anymore.
Lunchbox X11 [homepage] git 20151107 20240316 Alysander Stanley Defaults to tiling mode, with simple resizing. Also does stacking mode. Includes a "title menu" to replace tabs. "Working toward EWMH and ICCCM compliance." University project: will it continue? Written in C. Notes (2010)
LXP X11 [homepage] 0.2-1d 20070208 20240316 Manuel Carrasco Not a WM. "LXP is a desktop environment 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."
LXDE X11 [homepage]
[Wikipedia]
0.10.1 20210225 20240305 "The LXDE Team" The "Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment" (this isn't a window manager, it's a DE). A lighter alternative to KDE or GNOME. Uses Openbox as the default WM. Development is at https://github.com/lxde although their website still points to sourceforge.
LXQt X11 [homepage]
[Wikipedia]
1.4.0 20231105 20240212 "The LXQt Team" The "Lightweight Qt Desktop Environment" (forked from LXDE). A lighter alternative to KDE or GNOME. Uses Openbox as the default WM. Wayland support a work in progress as of 2023-11.
maewm X11 not available Hack of aewm. Info and homepage from xwinman.org. URL seems to have died permanently 201008.
Manix X11 [homepage] not available 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? Site blank 201005, dead 201011.
Marco X11 [homepage]
[Wikipedia]
1.27.1 20240202 20240205 MATE maintainers(?) Fork of Metacity, window manager for the MATE desktop. Probably not something you'd run on its own.
Matchbox X11 [homepage]
[Wikipedia]
not available Matthew Allum Intended for handhelds and very small screens. Almost a full desktop (not just WM). Ran on the Nokia Internet Tablets, the OLPC (see also Sugar), and the OpenMoko phone. 202312: Yocto has dropped it? See Matchbox 2. 2003 Review
Matchbox 2 X11 [homepage]
[Wikipedia]
git 20231024 20240313 Matthew Allum Intended for handhelds and very small screens - "complete rewrite of Matchbox. Development appears to have stalled? (Last file change was text only, and not much before that).
matwm2 X11 [homepage] git 20200727 20240317 Mattis Michel A simplistic overlapping X11 window manager for POSIX systems." "... window frames with titlebar and buttons, configurable key bindings and mouse buttons, support for EWMH and motif hints, focus-follows-mouse and click-to-focus focus models, virtual desktops, Xft fonts and xinerama support."
mavosxwm X11 [homepage] 0.2.1 20030221 20240204 Martin Vollrathson Based on wm2. 200808: download link broken, check sourceforge link .
Maxx Interactive Desktop X11 [homepage] 2.1.1 2020-06? 20240316 Eric Masson Similar to the proprietary Silicon Graphics IRIX 4Dwm, previously called 5dwm. Restrictive license with SGI (not open source, although he claims they're opening it). Site has changed and/or vanished in the past.
mazewm X11 [homepage] 1.0.1 20140121 20240201 "goingnuts" (Sourceforge name) "Based on mlvwm with elements from HaZe. Added style for menubar, menus and desktop background. Added sound theme capabilities." Claims a very small memory footprint.
mcwm X11 [homepage] git/20181007 20181007 20240307 Michael "MC" Cardell Widerkrantz Floating (not tiling) minimalist WM. Built on XCB, doesn't use Xlib. ISC license. Borrows ideas from ctwm, evilwm, vi / nethack, tinywm. Declared "stopped" late 2013.
mdtwm X11 [homepage] git 20200709 20240201 Michał "ziutek" Derkacz mdt = "Mouse Driven Tiling" (virtually all tiling WMs are very keyboard-oriented). Written in Go. Strange mouse choices, using the right mouse button for all actions.
Metacity X11 [homepage]
[Wikipedia]
3.50.0 20230923 20240206 "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.
Metisse X11 [homepage]
[Wikipedia]
not available 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 2009-10, stalled 2011? Site dead 2022-06.
Mezzo X11 [homepage]
[Wikipedia]
not available Ryan Quinn Part of Symphony OS, a modification of fvwm 2 that runs on a modified(?) Ubuntu. Website makes grandiose statements about running all Linux and Windows apps ... but development appears to be at a standstill. Site died approx. 201012.
MID4Linux X11 "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 X11 [homepage] 1-1 20030709 20240202 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 X11 [homepage]
[Wikipedia]
0.9.1 20000627 20240204 Takahashi Hasegawa Macintosh like virtual WM. (The website is so old (2000!) it uses the <blink> tag.)
Moksha X11 [homepage] 0.4.1 20230827 20240204 Jeff Hoogland A fork of Enlightenment DR17 under the auspices of Bodhi Linux. The page recommends Bodhi, go to GitHub to get Moksha itself.
Monkey WM X11 [homepage] 0.3 20071107 20240206 Chris Tillberg GPL, written in Freepascal. The author took hints from sWM and WindowLab.
monsterwm X11 [homepage] git 20120303 20240202 Ivan "c00kiemon5ter" Kanakarakis Lineage: 2wm/dwm -> catwm -> dminiwm -> monsterwm. Tiling, minimalist. Good instructions at archlinux wiki.
Mosquito X11 [homepage]
not available erth7411 at csd dot uu dot se C++, garish colours. Website has been significantly stripped ~2008-04. 403 ~2011-04 on, 404 ~2011-10.
Mousetoxin X11 [homepage]
not available Troels "Athas" Henriksen, Martin "dybber" Dybdal "A reimplementation of Ratpoison in Literate Haskell." Apparently abandoned: "homepage" points to author's "programs" page although this program doesn't appear there.
Multi-Cursor Window Manager X11 [homepage] 1.0 20060310 20240317 Grant Wallace et al Supports multiple simultaneous users. Based on (an old version of) IceWM.
MPWM X11 [homepage]
[Wikipedia]
not available 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 was a proof-of-concept WM that he made available. Thank him when you see multi-touch in X. MPWM appears to be gone.
Muffin Wayland/X11 [homepage] 6.0.1 20231228 20240214 Primary GitHub contributors: Clement Lefebvre, Michael Webster The WM for Cinnamon. Cinnamon is a GNOME Shell fork, and Muffin a fork of Mutter, the GNOME Shell WM.
Musca X11 not available Sean Pringle Tiling WM, borrows from Ratpoison and dwm, uses dmenu for menuing. Wikipedia says "Musca ... is one of the minor southern constellations."
Mutter Wayland/X11 [homepage]
[Wikipedia]
45.4 20240211 20240213 The base WM for GNOME 3, replaced Metacity using the Clutter graphics library (thus the name). Can apparently be used as a stand-alone WM.
MWM (Lesstif) X11 [homepage]
[Wikipedia]
0.95.2 20090527 20240316 "Hungry Programmers" The originally proprietary, now free Motif WM was re-implemented at lesstif.org. That project stopped early 2013 after Motif was open-sourced. See Enhanced MWM for a modern (2023) fix. 2003 Review
MWM (Motif) X11 [homepage]
[Wikipedia]
2.3.8 20171205 20240307 Based on the Motif toolkit, appeared in the early 1990s. Originally proprietary (Lesstif was made as a free replacement), now open-source.
niri Wayland [homepage] 0.1.3 20240309 20240317 Ivan "YaLTeR" Molodetskikh Infinite side-scrolling tiling Wayland compositor written in Rust. "Windows are arranged in columns on an infinite strip going to the right. Opening a new window never causes existing windows to resize."
NovaWM X11 [homepage] Alpha-0.8.1 20080406 20240206 Tim "realmz" Walters Looks like it takes its hints from Blackbox?
miNimalistic WM X11 [homepage] 2015101600 20151016 20240206 Adam Tlałka Based on evilwm and aewm, GPL.
newm Wayland [homepage] git 20230603 20240206 Jonas Bucher Wayland compositor, written in Python, tiling, MIT license. "[T]his repo is currently unmaintained. See newm-atha!"
newm-atha Wayland [homepage] git 20230808 20240208 "atha" ("Pandademic" on GitHub) Fork of newm (previous maintainer didn't have time), "a touchpad & touchscreen centric wayland compositor based on wlroots."
NsCDE X11 [homepage] 2.3 20230616 20240317 git handle "Hegel3DReloaded" "Not so Common Desktop Environment" - similar in look to CDE, based on FVWM and verging on being a "Desktop Environment."
nwm X11 [homepage] 1.3.0 20150909 20240208 Mikito "mixu" Takada "Tiling window manager for X11 written in Node.js." Requires node.js (of course). Looks like documentation is fairly good.
Notion X11 [homepage] git 20230404 20240307 orig. Tuomo Valkonen. Now "the Notion team," incl. Arnout Engelen. Carries on the abandoned Ion3 under a modified LGPL license. Tiling. Scriptable in Lua. See also anion3.
olvwm X11 [Wikipedia] not available was Scott Oaks, now Tomas Konojacki Emulates Sun olwm with virtual desktops. Last available (that I knew of) in Debian jessie.
olwm X11 [Wikipedia] not available Was Sun Microsystems (many patches applied since public release). now Tomas Konojacki. Last available (that I knew of) in Debian jessie. Sun olwm (or a clone thereof?). Package shown is Debian oldstable (not available in stable or testing, although it continues to lurk in sid).
OmegaWM X11 [homepage] not available Hyriand The author, "Hyriand," also worked on Kahakai. Requires SConstruct, Cairo, ImLib2.
Openbox X11 [homepage]
[Wikipedia]
3.6.1 20150701 20240213 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. A personal favourite. As it's considered feature-complete, very little development happens.
orbment Wayland [homepage] git 20160813 20240202 Jari "Cloudef" Vetoniemi Tiling compositor for Wayland. On their website, this is filed under "Unmaintained projects."
Orion X11 [homepage] 0.2 20040524 20240211 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 X11 [homepage] not available Guido Schimmels and Jonatan Liljedahl 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. No software available anymore ... and webpage disappeared ~2023-09.
Oroborus X11 [homepage] X
not available orig. Ken Lynch, later Stefan Pfetzing. Minimalist, includes utilities to bind keys and launch applications. Last release 2010. 2020-08: site changed hands to a VR project.
Parti X11 [homepage] git 20170423 20240208 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. Also "[defunct]."
PAWM X11 [homepage] 2.3.0 20100503 20240214 David Gómez Espinosa, Raúl Nùñez de Arenas Coronado. Puto Amo Window Manager. Small. Unmaintained since 2011.
PekWM X11 [homepage] 0.3.0 20230123 20240225 Claes Nästén, Andreas "ioerror" Based on aewm++ with window grouping like PWM and Fluxbox. I rather liked this WM (years ago). There are code commits on the GitHub repo more recent than the version linked at the website.
PerlWM X11 [homepage] 0.0.7 20040523 20240211 Rich Williams(?) Written in Perl. Not very stable or usable (2003). And not updated since 2004.
Phluid X11 [homepage] 0.0.3 20001113 20240215 Matthew M. Elder Declared dead by developer 200304. Used Imlib2, aimed for ICCCM compliance. BSD License.
piewm X11 [homepage] X not available tvtwm modified to use pie menus - an early rudimentary implementation of mouse gestures.
Pixie X11 [homepage] not available Johan "Owl" Ceuppens This isn't quite a window manager. It's a library for creating WMs. Gone 404 ~2012-02.
PLWM X11 [homepage] 2.6a 20040409 20240212 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. Some activity 200911.
progman X11 [homepage] git 20231101 20240202 Joshua Stein Looks like Program Manager from Windows 3, based on aewm. Author also wrote sdorfehs.
Puppet X11 [homepage] 0.3 20080213 20240212 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. "window manager" link is broken, but "download" is still available.
PWM X11 [homepage]
[Wikipedia]
not available Tuomo Valkonen "The first tabbing window manager." The author moved on to Ion, and then left open source entirely - his website is now down. Ion could also be compiled to behave like PWM. 2003 Review
pwm (2) X11 [homepage] 2.39 20230330 20240316 Hiroyuki Ohsaki "A simple but extensible X11 window manager written in Perl." Run a Makefile that fetches the 'pwm' script and needed software ... if you're on Debian. There's manual installation on other OSes. "Motivated by" perlwm. Tiling, no window decorations. See also same author's xpywm.
PycaWM X11 [homepage] not available Vincent Rasneur, Anaël Verrier. Written in Python. GPLv3.
Pyro Desktop X11 [homepage] not available Alex Graveley Firefox extension (for 3.0x?) that turns the browser into a WM and web desktop. Their website doesn't make it clear: you need a compositing window manager or this won't work. Worked very poorly on my machine circa 2007. Page had DB errors 2011-01 to 2012-09.
PyWM X11 [homepage] 0.1-1-a4-1 20060417 20240212 orig. David Mcnab, now Elmo Mäntynen. A modification of FLWM scriptable in Python. Author says it's a very early version. I doubt it would work with any current version of Python.
qlwm X11 [homepage] not available 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 Wayland/X11 [homepage] 0.24.0 20240120 20240213 Aldo Cortesi Written in Python, tiling, screenshot suggests strong similarities to wmii/dwm. MIT license.
quarkwm X11 [homepage] 3_200710022054 20071002 20240212 FC Keyboard-driven, some similarities to Ratpoison. The source code appears to be totally uncommented.
qvwm X11 [homepage] 30042007 20070430 20240216 orig. Kenichi Kourai. 2007 onward: "ali vardar," Jim "jserv" Huang, Mitch "mjd" Davis. Windows 95-alike. Written from scratch in C++. Website died ~2012-11, now pointing to a more recently modified version maintained by ... someone else. 2003 Review
Ratpoison X11 [homepage]
[Wikipedia]
1.4.9 20170404 20240216 Shawn Betts Tiling keyboard-driven minimalist WM with emacs- and screen-like key bindings. 2003 Review
rio X11 [homepage]
[Wikipedia]
git 20240109 20240216 Russ Cox and others on GitHub 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. For source, look for a github link (no branches, no tags ... urgh).
River WM Wayland [homepage] v0.2.6 20231125 20240317 Isaac Freund "River is a dynamic tiling Wayland compositor with flexible runtime configuration." "Note: river is currently early in development. Expect breaking changes and missing features." Written in Zig.
ROX Desktop X11 [homepage]
[Wikipedia]
~2018 20240201 Not a WM: ROX is a file manager imitating the RISC OS GUI that manages your desktop on top of a WM (currently OroboROX).
rpx X11 [homepage] X
not available Thien-Thi Nguyen

"[A] port of ratpoison to Guile 1.4.x Scheme," "RatPoison eXhumed." Requires ttn-do (presumably a product of the same author, whose initials are TTN). Site died between 20180825 and 20190112.

RTL Siemens Tiled Window Manager X11 [homepage] 5.2-working 20111219 20240208 Originally RTL Siemens, now Christoph Lohmann and Paul Onyschuk One of the first tiling window managers (~1988) cleaned to work with Linux systems ~2011.
s3d X11 [homepage] 0.2.2.1 20200126 20240213 Simon Wunderlich s3d "is a 3d network display server which can be used as 3d desktop enviroment." Hard to build at v0.2.1.1 (2009), haven't tried since. 0.2.2.1 released 2020, nine years after 0.2.2.
Sapphire X11 [homepage] not available 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
Sara X11 [homepage] git 20220908 20240129 "gitluin" at GitHub Tiling. "Originally a fork of catwm, now an offspring of dwm" ... "with a bit of bspwm (sockets) for good measure, and some extra UNIX philosophy inspiration from monsterwm." Announcement at Reddit. Now archived at GitHub.
Sawfish X11 [homepage]
[Wikipedia]
1.13.0 20211224 20240208 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 text [homepage]
[Wikipedia]
4.9.1 20230817 20240219 Originally Oliver Laumann, more recently Wayne Davison, Juergen Weigert and Michael Schroeder. Unsecured downloads: prefer your OS's package manager as this is bundled with every Linux. Screen is a text-based application that multiplexes a terminal between applications.
scrotwm X11 Marco Peereboom, Ryan Thomas McBride, Darrin Chandler Former name of spectrwm - see that entry.
scwm X11 [homepage]
[Wikipedia]
0.99.6.2 20000312 20240225 Greg J. Badros, Maciej Stachowiak, et al. "Scheme Constraints" WM. Configurable with a Guile Scheme language.
sdorfehs X11 [homepage] 1.5 20230127 20240202 Joshua Stein By the author of progman. "Pronounced 'starfish.'" Okay ... "A tiling window manager descended from ratpoison."
SithWM X11 [homepage] 1.2.3 20080425 20240214 Øyvind "Darth olr" Røtvold "Keyboard-driven," "minimalist." Based on evilwm: different (better, in my view) key bindings, new menu, functionality.
SkatOSWM X11 [homepage] 1.0 20050113 20240129 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..."
SmallWM X11 [homepage] git 20200228 20240229 Adam Marchetti "SmallWM is an extended version of TinyWM, made for actual desktop use." Public Domain. Nick Welsh's TinyWM is something of a classic at 50 lines of code, this is interesting.
Snapwm / Nextwm X11 [homepage] git 20200519 20240219 "moetunes" By the author of dminiwm, this "is dminiwm with a desktop switcher, info bar and reloadable rc file." Also known as "snapwm."
sowm X11 [homepage] 1.6 20200221 20240203 Dylan Araps "Shitty Opinionated Window Manager." Written in C, small and simple.
spectrwm X11 [homepage]
3.5.1 20231125 20240219 Marco Peereboom, Ryan Thomas McBride, Darrin Chandler Formerly "scrotwm." "... largely inspired by xmonad and dwm," borrows code from dwm, written in C. Tiling. ISC license. Source is in git, previously available tarballs seem to have vanished.
Spook X11 [homepage] not available 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 not available.
sscrotwm X11 [homepage] git 20120303 20240210 Jacob "sporkexec" Courtneay "Shriveled scrotwm is a minimalist fork of scrotwm/spectrwm."
Strata Wayland [homepage] git 20240121 20240225 Anant Narayan et al Wayland compositor written in Rust and based on Smithay library, uses Lua for configuration.
Stumpwm X11 [homepage]
[Wikipedia]
23.11 20231124 20240308 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. Download from the GitHub page (more recent versions).
subtle X11 [homepage] not available Christoph Kappel Tiling WM, behaviour based on Wily/ACME. Original code base was aewm, now fully rewritten. Requires Ruby and Rake. Configurable with Ruby (was Lua until about 2008).
Sugar X11 [homepage]
[Wikipedia]
13.2.11 20200129 20240201 "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.
Sway Wayland [homepage] 1.8.1 20230212 20240215 Drew "SirCmpwn" DeVault Drop-in replacement for i3 that uses Wayland.
SwayFX Wayland [homepage] 0.3.2 20230706 20240307 Erik Reider A fork of Sway with a prettier (blur, rounded corners, shadows, etc.) renderer.
Solbourne WM X11 [source]
[Wikipedia]
? 19930929 20240215 Tom LaStrange Solbourne WM. First WM with a virtual desktop, 1989. Also had some session management. "source" link points to a 1993 tarball originally from xwinman.org. The author, Tom LaStrange, previously wrote TWM.
SWM X11 [homepage] not available Adam Purkrt "... animating, TeX-like decorating (window, decorations, buttons etc. are treated as vboxes/hboxes) ..." First called "Simple" then "Spartan" (2012-04), then "S Window Manager." Website broken PHP 2013-03 to 08, WM gone 2014-01.
sWM X11 [homepage] 1.3.4c 20040624 20240210 Robert Sperling Small WM. Based on aewm, tries for ICCCM and GNOME compliance.
TabletWM X11 [homepage] 0.29 20171002 20240226 Sergio Costas Rodríguez A WM for tablets running X. Maximizes windows, no decorations, small code base. Provides a separate but probably needed launcher.
TAL/wm X11 [homepage] not available Nolan Liebert Originally based on dwm code. "The goal [was] to be even more minimal and equally as customizable." MIT License. Author (dwemo, AntiWM) says he's not going to maintain TAL/wm "as I really don't think we need more forks of dwm anymore." Source code vanished 200907.
TDE X11 [homepage] not available While the site still exists (2013-05), this Brazilian Windows XP imitator has vanished.
tekwm X11 [source] 19891122 19891122 20240215 Glenn Widener Written for Tektronix equipment, based on awm. "source" link above is to a 1989 tarball from X11R4.
tfwm X11 [homepage] 0.6 20130428 20240210 "Djay" aka "fennecdjay" "Tiny Floating manager ... with desktops,keybindings,and rules." GPLv3. Written in C.
TinyWM X11 [homepage] 1.3 20050310 20240219 Nick Welch 50 lines of C code, also available in Python. Also the author of Whimsy. Review (2007)
tmux text [homepage]
[Wikipedia]
3.3a 20220609 20240210 Nicholas Marriott BSD-licensed, terminal multiplexer - quite similar to "screen" but newer and less crufty. I use this extensively.
Toy'd X11 [homepage] not available 20240212 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. "There is no window manager yet, we are currently re-designing it." Rigor mortis is setting in: the old domain name is dead, files aren't available.
treewm X11 [homepage] 0.4.5 20030915 20240215 Thomas Jãger "The user can create desktops which can themselves contain windows and desktops." Not intuitive.
Trinity Desktop Environment X11 [homepage]
[Wikipedia]
R14.1.1 20231029 20240215 Timothy Pearson et al TDE is a continuation of KDE3, forked from v3.5. Timothy Pearson (the author) was the 3.x coordinator of Kubuntu releases.
tritium X11 [homepage] 0.3.5 20080613 20240221 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 X11 [homepage] not available 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. **Gone 404 2016-03.
True3D*Shell X11 not available Riccardo Pompeo "True3D*Shell is an open source 3D desktop environment ... experience 3D browsing in a virtual reality universe ..." but does it manage windows? Written in C++ (with Eclipse). Site advertising crapware ~201311.
tsubasa X11 [homepage] X not available Nicolas Centa "It is written in C++, mostly using safe programming techniques, uses midtalk and gtkmm. ... It is recommanded that you use Xephyr in order to test tsubasa, as it is not very stable at the moment." 403 on 2019-05 to 2019-08.
tvtwm X11 [homepage]
[Wikipedia]
1.0.1 20150322 20240221 John D. Hendrickson, Chris Ross, orig. Tom LaStrange Tom's Virtual Tab WM (the virtual desktop is a viewport to one large area) version of TWM. The project has recently (2015 ...) been fixed to compile more easily on current systems.
twin text [homepage]
[Wikipedia]
git 20230921 20240219 Massimiliano Ghilardi twin is a text-based WM for the console or terminal. I had trouble getting it to compile and/or behave in 2008 (there have been several releases since ...), although I used it heavily prior to that. These days I prefer tmux.
Twindy X11 [homepage] not available Niall Moody 2021-10: WM removed from site. "Inspired by Tracktion, the multitrack audio editor/sequencer." Version 1.00 was intended to be the "final," last release, but he's continued occasional updates. Language: C++. Review of version 0.45b. Notes
TWM X11 [homepage]
[Wikipedia]
1.0.12 20220402 20240226 Tom LaStrange "Tom's" or "Tab" WM, although not tabbed in the modern sense of grouping. Old, usually very stable. Not developed, just maintained. Version and homepage are from Debian (stable) packages. 2003 Review
UDE X11 [homepage]
[Wikipedia]
0.2.11b 20220605 20240221 Christian Ruppert Unix Desktop Environment. Unusual design.
ukwm Wayland/X11 [homepage] 1.2.1 20210604 20240221 "handsome-feng," "liuyi92", et al No README file in the git repo, NEWS file says "Fork from GNOME3 mutter for UKUI." "UKUI" is a desktop environment ... and that's about all I know.
UnWimp X11 not available 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 is frequently broken, project appears abandoned.
uwm X11 [source] ? 19970213 20240109 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.
μwm X11 [homepage] 0.30 20111109 20240219 "Johns johns98@gmx.net" Written in C, stacking, very few dependencies, GPL3. Looks like it includes everything most people expect: menu, multiple desktops, themes, toolbar, etc.
Velox X11 [homepage] git 20220210 20240228 Michael Forney Inspired by awesome, xmonad, dwm. Configured with YAML. Uses Wayland.
Vivarium Wayland [homepage] git 20230917 20240308 Alexander "inclement" Taylor Tiling compositor using wlroots "with desktop semantics inspired by xmonad."
Vtwm X11 [homepage]
[Wikipedia]
5.5.0 20180421 20240201 Tom LaStrange et al. Extends TWM with a large (single) virtual desktop - like tvtwm. The snapshot file shows activity 201003.
VWM text [homepage] 2.1.3 20091104 20240215 Bryan Christ A competitor 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 X11 [homepage] 0.4.2 20041223 20240222 Benjamin Drieu. Based on David Hogan's 9wm. Adds virtual desktops to 9wm. 2003 Review
Waimea X11 [homepage] 0.4.0 20021105 20240222 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.
waybox Wayland [homepage] git 20220418 20240226 Stefan "schickst" Schick "Wayland Compositor based on smithay written in Rust. It will be similar to fluxbox and openbox ... Do not expect this software to be useful at this point in time!"
Way Cooler Wayland [homepage] 0.8.1 20181122 20240308 Preston "Timidger" Carpenter, and others on GitHub "... is a tiling Wayland window manager, written in Rust, configurable using Lua, and extendable with D-Bus." "This repository has been archived by the owner" in 2020.
Wayfire Wayland [homepage] 0.8.0 20231007 20240205 "Wayfire is a wayland compositor based on wlroots [part of sway]. It aims to create a customizable, extendable and lightweight environment ..."
WeeWM X11 [homepage] X not available flashcode AT flashtux DOT org, xahlexx AT weeland DOT org, bounga AT altern DOT org. Small, keyboard-oriented. Site died between ~201904.
Weston Wayland [homepage] 12.0.3 20231128 20240216 Wayland contributors Gentoo's docs say "Weston is a reference implementation of a Wayland compositor." The Gentoo docs imply you shouldn't use this. I've used it (2023-10 ... not for long): it seems stable and usable, but lacking in any extra features (again: "reference implementation").
Whim X11 [homepage] not available 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. Site dead 2014-06 on. Code available here.
Whimsy X11 [homepage] 0.1a1 20080713 20240222 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."
wimpwm X11 [homepage] X not available 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." Site died ~2018-01.
Wind X11 [homepage] 1.5 20140521 20240211 Johan Veenhuizen "Overlapping window management ... click-to-...focus ... implements most parts of ICCCM and EWMH/NetWM." MIT/X license. Very basic appearance (as of 1.0). Task bar with pager, menu, clock, window list. Virtual desktops, no minimize. Same author as the older Karmen.
Window Manager From Scratch (WMFS) X11 [homepage] git 20180520 20240228 Martin Duquesnoy (primary) plus contributors "The goal of this project is to make a very basic, lightweight and dynamic WM." Tiling, BSD license, not currently stable. Original home wmfs.info vanished late 2014, now and advertising site. WMFS2 (which is what you get at this website(?)) is an incompatible rewrited of WMFS 1.
WindowLab X11 [homepage]
[Wikipedia]
git 20160227 20240228 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 X11 [homepage]
[Wikipedia]
0.96.0 20230805 20240308 Alfredo Kojima, Dan Pascu. Emulates NeXT's GUI. Abandoned for several years which spawned the Wmaker-crm maintenance fork. They merged 2012-02. 2003 Review
wingo X11 [homepage] git 20201011 20240222 Andrew "BurntSushi" Gallant Written in Go. Tiling and stacking multiheaded. Openbox meets xmonad? "In maintenance mode."
Wizard Desktop X11 [homepage] 16October2018 20181016 20240223 Andrew Waidler Tabbed and tiling, based on awesome and Ion, written with Java Swing and LGPL-3.0-licensed.
wm2 X11 [homepage]
[Wikipedia]
4 19970321 20240305 Chris Cannam Minimalist but looks great - unusual. With vertical title bars. If you want virtual desktops, see wmx. Last updated in 1997 ... 2003 Review
wmG X11 [homepage] not available Scott "Reeve" Barnes Intended to work with (a very old version of) GNOME. "This project is abandoned," site now dead.
WMI X11 [homepage] 11 20091127 20240216 Anselm R. Garbe "Window Manager Improved", spawned wmii and dwm. Development has ceased. The "homepage" listed here is a download folder at suckless.org.
wmii X11 [homepage] 3.9.2 20100610 20240316 orig. Anselm R. Garbe, Kris Maglione - maintainer. "Window Manager Improved 2". Primarily keyboard driven, tries to remain small. A personal favourite. Until 200711 they adamantly refused to support multi-monitor (Xinerama): not sure where that stands now. 3.6.x is more recent than 3.9.x ... I have no answer to that one.
wmonad X11 [homepage] git 20201108 20240205 Nick Spinale "wmonad is a tiling window manager based heavily on xmonad."
wmx X11 [homepage] 8 20141116 20240229 Chris Cannam Adds virtual desktops to wm2. Averaging one release every five years - he keeps this updated. 2003 Review, Notes
Worm X11 [homepage] 0.3.2 20220809 20240221 "codic12" Small, dynamic, tag-based WM written in Nim language.
WTFTW X11 [homepage] git 20210121 20240201 Simon "Kintaro" Wollwage Tiling. Written in Rust.
wwm X11 [homepage] 2.0 19990212 20240206 Jörg Czeranski Weird WM. Was intended as a OS prototype rather than a WM, and appears abandoned.
XD640 X11 [homepage] 0.3.1-1 20050521 20240203 Jean-Marc Lienher "Lightweight desktop environment and office suite ... Warning: ... early development stage! The development is currently stalled." Aiming at i486 66MHz 16MB, 640x480, BSD license, based on fltk. 2021-08: Redesigned (French) site. No code available at the moment.
XFast X11 [homepage]
[Wikipedia]
0.9 20080707 20240305 "oxygenic" Incorporates a window server and manager in one, intended for embedded systems. Forked from Xynth.
xfwm Wayland/X11 [homepage]
[Wikipedia]
4.18 20221215 20240202 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.
XIGE X11 [homepage] not available 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 X11 [homepage]
[Wikipedia]
0.18.0 20240203 20240208 Spencer Janssen, Don Stewart, Jason Creighton. Rewrite and extension of dwm in Haskell. Includes Xinerama (which dwm does not). Tiling, keyboard-oriented. Recent versions of xmonad will rebuild themselves if you change the config file. They're trying to port to Wayland (2023-11).
xoat X11 [homepage] git 20160629 20240313 Sean Pringle "An obstinate, asymmetric, tiling, window manager for X." Same author as goomwwm.
XPde X11 [homepage] not available José León, Zeljan Rikalo, Jens Kühner, Valery Gabrusev. XP-alike for Linux. "Desktop environment." Written in Kylix (discontinued proprietary Pascal variant). Domain expired 2011-09.
xpywm X11 [homepage] 1.14 20231221 20240204 Hiroyuki Ohsaki "A simple but extensible X11 window manager written in Python." Based on the same author's pwm (2) which was written in Perl, in turn "motivated by" perlwm. Available through PyPi.
XSWM X11 [homepage] 1.1 20040826 20240208 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 X11 [homepage] 0.5 20080420 20240212 Claudio M. Alessi Keyboard-driven, "implements tags for X11." Intended to be used with dvtm ... and no other WM. Interesting idea - but long abandoned.
XWEM X11 [homepage]
CVS ~2005 20240212 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: this is an older site. See also the much more active Emacs X Window Manager.
xwm X11 [homepage] 0.1.9 20220125 20240208 Michael "mcpcpc" Czigler "A minimal viable solution that was developed with single-monitor workflows in mind." Requires some suckless tools.
Xynth X11 [homepage]
[Wikipedia]
0.10.82 20090417 20240205 Alper Akcan X server replacement and desktop environment for embedded environment. LGPL. XFast is a GPL fork of this. Domain xynth.org dropped unceremoniously 200908.
YAWM X11 [homepage] not available 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 X11 [homepage] 0.3.5 20041125 20240214 knorke_at_phrat.de Based on evilwm and aewm with mildly BeOS-like appearance.
ZDE X11 [homepage] not available Thomas Coppi "Zeta Desktop Environment." Window manager plus a couple tools. Version number is "zimwm". Objective C and Perl. Author considers it alpha. Died summer 2014.
ZWM X11 [homepage] 1.0.0 20020208 20240214 Nils Gladitz "First ZWM code release," now quite old. SDL-based. After a decade of nothing, "As of 2013-02-22, this project is no longer under active development."

https://www.gilesorr.com/wm/table.html 
Last modified: 2024-03-17 07:43 by giles