| 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 (141 as of 20070502). 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. New testing/alpha/beta versions won't be listed when a stable version is available.
I am adding non-English WMs, with the caveat that English is the only language I speak and no one should be surprised if I accidentally add a link to a prank page ... (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: AntiWM (20080523), XFast (20080630), TAL/wm (20080630), dwemo (20080630), tmux (20080730), Xynth (20080810).
Most recent updates: 20080824
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| Name | URLs | Version | Release date | Date checked | Authors | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2wm |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
0.1 | 20070212 | 20080824 | 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. |
| 3Dwm |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
No longer available. | 20080804 | 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] |
beta1 | No longer available. | 20080731 | Similar to the proprietary Silicon Graphics IRIX 4Dwm. Webpage vanished between 20070406 and 20070617. Domain is still in existence. | |
| 9wm |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
1.1 | 19960208 | 20080817 | 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] |
None yet | 20060411 | 20080731 | Michael Brailsford | Child of Kahakai, based on aewm++. You can download the code, but not as a tarball: file by file. |
| aewm |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
1.2.7 devel: 1.3.12 |
20071227 | 20080805 | Decklin Foster | A very popular code base for many other WMs. 2003 Review |
| aewm++ |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
Not available. | Frank Hale | Sapphire and aewm++ were different aspects of a project by Frank Hale. aewm++ was a rewrite of aewm (which is in C) in C++. Source doesn't appear to be available anymore. 2003 Review | ||
| AfterStep |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
2.2.8 | 20080317 | 20080806 | Sasha Vasko | "Originally based on the look and feel of the NeXTStep interface." |
| AHWM |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
0.90 | 20020224 | 20080804 | 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 | 20080804 | 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. | 20080823 | Last known address http://www.phatboydesigns.net/alloywm/ is now advertising space. Was a modification of aewm. Version 0.4.0 seems to be available from some mirrors. | ||
| alpt-wm |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
0.0.7 | 20071013 | 20080817 | AlpT | "This is my custom, window manager. It's small, functional and fast. It is based on dwm ..." |
| amaterus |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
No longer available. | 20080806 | Hiroyuki Komatsu | GTK-based. Screen shots all show GNOME toolbar. Source (last known version 0.34.1, 20021124) is MIA. | |
| AmiWM |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
0.20pl48 | 19980315 | 20080806 | Marcus Comstedt | Imitates the Amiga Workbench. Has its own "Generic amiwm License." |
| Anarchy |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
0.1.0.1 | 20050720 | 20080731 | Eduardo Cavazos | "CLOS oriented Scheme code. The implementation language is Gauche Scheme." It requires Gauche and gauche-x. |
| AntiRight |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
3.6 | 20071123 | 20080809 | 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] |
0.0.3 | 20080803 | 20080809 | 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, v5.0 beta 4 | 20040903 | 20071208 (v4.1) | 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." |
| awesome |
[homepage]
[freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
3.0-rc2 | 20080808 | 20080813 | 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 | 20080815 | Ken Wallich | "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." "Homepage" link is to an archive at xwinman.org. |
| B4Step |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
2.2 | 20010627 | 20080824 | 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 | 20080824 | Robert Annessi | Website: "Not actively maintained." Minimalist, no decorations. |
| Beryl |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
0.2.1 | 20070317 | 20080804 | Quinn_Storm, Dennis Kasprzyk, Nicholas Thomas, Robert Carr, Nigel Cunningham, Kristian Lyngstøl | Fork of the graphics-heavy compiz. Compiz and Beryl have (mostly?) re-merged (starting ~200705) to create "Compiz Fusion." |
| Blackbox |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
0.70.1 | 20051103 | 20080824 | Brad Hughes, then Jeff Raven, now Sean Shaleh Perry. | One of the mainstays of the alternative WM world. 2003 Review |
| BrainTop |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
0.1rc5 | 20060415 | 20080824 | MadBob | Part of the "Lobotomy" project. The window manager "BrainTop" is a derivative of, and very similar to, XFCE. |
| Clementine |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
0.0.7 beta | 20020325 | 20080804 | 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] |
0805 | 20080518 | 20080809 | Philippe Brochard | "Based on tinywm and stumpwm." Written entirely in Common Lisp, requires a lisp interpreter. |
| Compiz |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
0.6.2
devel: 0.7.6 |
20071018 (stable), 20080529 (devel) |
20080809 | Extremely attractive and graphics-intensive. Compiz and Beryl are reportedly (re-)merging (200705?) but action on this has been slow. | |
| CTWM |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
3.8a | 20070216 | 20080804 | Claude Lecommandeur | Adds virtual desktops and even more configurability to TWM. 2003 Review |
| cwm |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
release 3 | 20050828 | 20080804 | Marius Aamodt Eriksen | Originally based on evilwm, now written from scratch. |
| dvtm |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
0.4.1 | 20080510 | 20080816 | Marc Andre Tanner | Dynamic Virtual Terminal Manager: "dvtm brings dwm and it's concept of tiling window management to the console." Borrowed some code from dwm. Text only. MIT/X Consortium License. Notes |
| dwemo |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
0.0.2 | 20080517 | 20080824 | 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. |
| dwm |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
5.1 | 20080729 | 20080731 | 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 4.8 source package 17kb. 4.8 is supposed to include Xinerama support. MIT license. |
| echinus wm |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
20080618 | 20080731 | 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. | |
| Eclipse |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
No longer available. | 20080815 | Nikos Drakos, Ross Moore, Erik Enge ... | Written in Common Lisp. Student programming project. Website available, but pointer to CVS snapshot tarball is broken. Several documents mentioned, but all are placeholders. | |
| ede |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
1.2 | 20071116 | 20080809 | 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] |
0.8.1 | 20020813 | 20080817 | Serdar Öaut;zler. | Turkish. Development has ceased. Written in C++. |
| Elevate |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
0.2.0 | 20071118 | 20080809 | Kostis Kapelonis | Part of "Project Elevate" to simplify our complex UIs. Requires a couple other components to complete the project. |
| Enlightenment |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
0.16.8.13 | 20080501 | 20080809 | 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. E17 (with brilliant new features) has been promised since ~2002 (yes, for six years), but their reach permanently exceeds their grasp. 2003 Review |
| EPIwm |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
0.5.6 | 20020110 | 20080824 | Students at EPITA in France. | "Small, fast, light." School project. Appears fairly themeable. |
| EvilPoison |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
git(?) only | 20080804 | 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." Has never moved out of repositories (previously subversion). Wikipedia article was deleted 2007 because WM was considered "non-notable." | |
| evilwm |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
1.0.0 | 20070618 | 20080809 | Ciaran Anscomb | Minimalistic keyboard driven WM with vi- and nethack-like key bindings. 2003 Review |
| expocity |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
2.6.2-1 | 20040102 | 20080813 | Applies Apple Exposé-like behaviour to Metacity. Development discontinued: "This version is now outdated and the modern X window system nowadays allows for much better effects than what was possible with expocity." Webpage (20080219-0813) currently offline. | |
| failsafewm | Bundled with swm. See swm. | |||||
| Firebox |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
0.5.0 | 20080123 | 20080731 | Cyrille Bagard | Written from scratch in C, inspired by Fluxbox, Hackedbox, Blackbox, Enlightenment, and WindowLab, but particularly by Openbox and wmii. |
| Fluxbox |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
1.0.0 | 20071008 | 20080804 | 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 | 20080813 | 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 | 20080731 | Florence Gestio | "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 ... so probably not strictly a WM. |
| Framer |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
0.1 | 20030421 | 20080813 | Christoph Dietze | Written in old version of Eiffel, meant to go with ROX. Appears to be abandoned, ROX has moved on. Requires wxWindows. |
| fvwm |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
1.24r | 19950726 | 20080815 | Robert Nation et al. | Version 1 of this venerable WM is still used, but no longer supported. |
| fvwm2 |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
2.4.20 devel: 2.5.26 |
20061209 | 20080815 | 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 | 20080813 | Hector Peraza | fvwm2 modified to look and act like Windows 95. Among the downloads there is also a file called fvwm98. |
| fvwm-crystal |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
3.0.6 | 20070623 | 20080731 | Maciej Delmanowski | fvwm dressed up to look and act even better. Requires a recent version of fvwm2. |
| fwm |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
63 | 20080309? | 20080731 | Alexander Polakov | The abandoned predecessor to echinus wm (see above). Based on dwm's source code, partly inspired by Plan 9's rio. |
| fxwm |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
0.1.12 | 20061128 | 20080813 | Sander Jansen | "Fox Desktop." The homepage listed above is the author's rather than the window manager's. The WM's homepage isn't being updated. |
| GNOME |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
2.22 | 200802? | 20080729 | 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 | 20080813 | Orig. Jordan DeLong, now Bruce Ashfield. | Nice looking, promising project with extremely infrequent code releases. 2003 Review |
| gwm |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
2.0 | 20050328 | 20080823 | 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] |
017+5 005 | 20010322 | 20080817 | 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 a side project to go with the editor Efuns. |
| HackedBox |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
0.8.5 | 20070120 | 20080817 | 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 | 20080805 | 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] |
0.2 | 20010623 | 20080817 | argonaut_@yahoo.com | mlvwm (Macintosh-8/9-alike) modified - very black and white. |
| heliwm |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
1.13 | 20060303 | 20080817 | Hidetoshi Ohtomo | Intended to be extremely small and light ("to save electricity consumption"). No virtual desktops. 2003 Review |
| IceWM |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
1.2.34 testing 1.3.2 |
20071227 | 20080809 | Originally Marko Macek, also Mathias Hasselmann. | Written (in C++) to emulate OS/2 and Windows 95/98, but it's grown. Themeable with virtual desktops. 2003 Review |
| Integrity |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
1.0 | 20040711 | 20080817 | Jason Athey | QT-based. |
| Interface |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
0.2.5 | 20030914 | 20080823 | Ian Mondragon | Written in Objective C for GNUstep. |
| Ion |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
3-20080707 | 20080707 | 20080804 | Tuomo Valkonen | Keyboard-driven framing tabbed WM. Successor to PWM. 2003 Review |
| JD4X |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
0.6 | 20060201 | 20080817 | Tay Hock Keong, Brandon Tay, Joseph Gledhill, Marc Patteet, Christopher R. | Java Desktop 4 X. |
| Jewel |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
0.12.40 | 20020823 | 20080823 | 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 | 20080823 | 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 | 20080809 | Joe Wingbermuehle | Joe's WM - young, buggy, similar to IceWM and Windows 98. |
| Kahakai |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
0.6.2 | 20040207 | 20080804 | 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] |
0.14 | 20080525 | 20080817 | 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] |
4.1.0 | 20080729 | 20080804 | KDE (unlike its best known competitor) does include a Window Manager, kwm. Famous, big, pretty. | |
| larswm |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
7.5.3 | 20040715 | 20080804 | Lars Bernhardsson | Keyboard-driven, minimalist, auto-tiling (the first?). Based on 9wm. Includes Xinerama support. |
| 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" - see its description above. | ||||
| Looking Glass 3D |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
1.0 | 20061219 | 20080823 | 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. GPL, sponsored by Sun. Binary packages, but I see no source? The version number suggests the product is gold, but comments on the site indicate it's "early beta." At best. See also this project page. |
| Lucca WM |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
0.1.2 | 20080422 | 20080731 | Vincent Povirk | MIT license tiling WM intended for GNOME. Written in C, requires GTK and XLib. |
| lwm |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
1.2.1 | 20040930 | 20080815 | Originally Elliott Hughes. Maintenance by James Carter. | "Lightweight" WM, fairly minimal decorations. |
| Luminocity |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
? | 20080817 | 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] |
0.2-1 | 20070208 | 20080823 | Manuel Carrasco | "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] |
No longer available. | 20080815 | Hack of aewm. Info and homepage from xwinman.org. URL is broken, but is the only one available. | ||
| Manix |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
0.6 | 20080330 | 20080805 | Magnus Sjöstrand | Mac OS 8/9-alike. |
| Matchbox |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
1.2 | 20070413 | 20080804 | 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 | 20080824 | Martin Vollrathson | No connection to OS X despite name, based on wm2. |
| Metacity |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
2.23.55 | 20080714 | 20080804 | "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. 2003 Review |
| Metisse |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
0.4.0-rc4 | 20070126 | 20080824 | 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 to work myself. |
| Mezzo |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
2008.1 | 20080417 | 20080804 | 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 5dwm. | |||||
| miwm |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
1-1 | 20030709 | 20080804 | 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 | 20080815 | Takahashi Hasegawa | Macintosh like virtual WM. (The website is so old it uses the <blink> tag.) |
| Mosquito |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
0.5.43 | 20011206 | 20080729 | 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 | 20080815 | Grant Wallace et al | Supports multiple simultaneous users. Based on IceWM. |
| MPWM |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
git | ? | 20080824 | Peter Hutterer | Part of the "Multi-Pointer X Server" project, which is a major and difficult-to-build rewrite of X (the website says "Set aside at least a day to get everything running."). "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. |
| MWM |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
0.95.0 | 20060610 | 20080731 | M*tif WM re-implemented by the Hungry Programmers - part of the Lesstif package. 2003 Review | |
| NovaWM |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
Alpha-0.8 | 20021225 | 20080804 | "realmz" | Looks like it takes its hints from Blackbox? |
| olvwm |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
4.5 | 20030922 | 20080815 | Scott Oaks | Emulates Sun olwm with virtual desktops. Version 4.4.3.2p1.4-21 available under Debian testing - for i386 and several other architectures, but not amd64 (my current). |
| olwm |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
3.2p1.4-23 | 20080817 | 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? | |
| OmegaWM |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
0.2.1 | 20050413 | 20080815 | Hyriand | The author, "Hyriand," also worked on Kahakai. Requires SConstruct, Cairo, ImLib2. |
| Openbox |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
3.4.7.2 | 20080423 | 20080817 | 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 | 20080823 | David Frese, Norbert Freudemann. | Written in scsh. Similar behaviour to Ion. Still mentioned at the scsh pages (linked here) but all links appear to be broken. |
| OroboROX |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
0.9.8 | 20060305 | 20080805 | A modification of Oroborus intended for the ROX Desktop. Comments on the site suggest 0.9.8 may not be as good as 0.9.7.*. | |
| Oroborus |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
2.0.18 | 20060112 | 20080824 | orig. Ken Lynch, later Stefan Pfetzing. | Minimalist, includes utilities to bind keys and launch applications. |
| Parti |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
0.0.4 | 20080405 | 20080804 | 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 | 20080729 | David Gómez Espinosa, Raúl Núñez de Arenas Coronado. | Puto Amo Window Manager. Small. |
| PekWM |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
0.1.6 | 20070528 | 20080804 | Claes Nästén | Based on aewm++ with window grouping like pwm and fluxbox. I rather like this WM. Recent code available through a git repository. |
| PerlWM |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
0.0.7 | 20040523 | 20080804 | Rich Williams(?) | Written in Perl. Not very stable or usable. |
| Phluid |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
0.0.3 | 20001113 | 20080815 | Matthew M. Elder | Declared dead by developer 200304. Used Imlib2, aimed for ICCCM compliance. BSD License. |
| piewm |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
1.04 | 20060314 | 20080731 | tvtwm modified to use pie menus - an early rudimentary implementation of mouse gestures. | |
| PLWM |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
2.6a | 20040407 | 20080804 | 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 | 20080804 | Stephen Tse, Roman Kennke | The WM for the Escher Java Library, downloaded as a part of Escher. Version number is for Escher. |
| PWM |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
20070720 | 20070720 | 20080809 | Tuomo Valkonen | "The first tabbing window manager." The author now works exclusively (so he claims - but there have been a couple new releases) on Ion (above) but Ion can be compiled to behave like pwm. This is "version 1" and the Ion mod is considered "version 2." 2003 Review |
| pwm2 | See Ion2 - pwm2 is a version of Ion (and bundled with Ion) that behaves more like the old PWM. | |||||
| PycaWM |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
0.1 | 20071221 | 20080804 | Vincent Rasneur, Anaëaut;l Verrier. | Written in Python. |
| Pyro Desktop |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
0.1 | 20070718 | 20080804 | 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 | 20080804 | 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] |
4.2 | 20070615 | 20080815 | Alexander Linden | Based on Qt, written in C++. Window decorations are Fluxbox-like. Switches readily between traditional, tiling, and full screen modes. Review. |
| quarkwm |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
3_200710022054 | 20071002 | 20080809 | FC | Keyboard-driven, some similarities to ratpoison. The source code appears to be totally uncommented. |
| qvwm |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
1.1.12 | 20020217 | 20080731 | Kenichi Kourai | Windows 95-alike. Written from scratch in C++. timer patch at website 20060801. 2003 Review |
| Ratpoison |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
1.4.3 | 20080219 | 20080817 | Shawn Betts | Tiling keyboard-driven minimalist WM with emacs- and screen-like key bindings. 2003 Review |
| rio |
[homepage] [Freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
20080804 | 20080605 | 20080804 | 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). The date I give is for the most recent release of plan9port. |
| ROX Desktop |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
Not a WM: ROX is a file manager imitating the RISC OS GUI that manages your desktop on top of a WM (currently OroboROX, see its entry). | ||||
| s3d |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
0.2 | 20061024 | 20080804 | Simon Wunderlich | s3d "is a 3d network display server which can be used as 3d desktop enviroment." |
| Sapphire |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
0.15.6 | 20001107 | 20080729 | Frank Hale | "Sapphire" and aewm++ are different variants of the same project by the same author, but development on Sapphire seems to have stopped. The homepage appears deliberately blank since ~200706? You could download the version mentioned here from the tarball pointer at Freshmeat but that broke approx. 20070913. 2003 Review |
| Sawfish |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
1.3.3 | 20080218 | 20080817 | Formerly titled "sawmill." Highly scriptable through a LISP derivative. Was for some time the WM of GNOME. Appeared dead after 2003, new release 200707. | |
| screen |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
4.0.3 | 20080807 | 20080824 | Originally Oliver Laumann, more recently Wayne Davison, Juergen Weigert and Michael Schroeder. | Screen is a text-based application that multiplexes a terminal between applications. |
| scwm |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
0.99.6.2 | 20000312 | 20080731 | Greg J. Badros, Maciej Stachowiak, et al. | "Scheme Constraints" WM. Configurable with a Guile Scheme language. |
| SithWM |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
1.2.3 | 20080425 | 20080809 | 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 | 20080726 | 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..." |
| Stumpwm |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
0.9.4.1 | 20080718 | 20080824 | 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 |
? | 20080823 | Christoph Kappel | Tiling WM, behaviour based on Wily (an emulation of Plan 9's editor ACME). Original code base was aewm, now fully rewritten. Configurable with Lua. "subtler" provides similar functionality to that wmctrl provides for EWMH WMs. |
| Sugar |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
? | ? | 20080729 | "The OLPC Team" | The interface for the OLPC, written in Python. This is not a WM, as it 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 | 20080823 | 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 | 20080824 | Robert Sperling | Small WM. Based on aewm, tries for ICCCM and GNOME compliance. |
| TAL/wm |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
0.0.2 | 20080519 | 20080805 | 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 is to be even more minimal and equally as customizable." MIT License. Same author as dwemo and AntiWM. Author Nolan Liebert says he's not expecting to maintain TAL/wm "as I really don't think we need more forks of dwm anymore." |
| TDE |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [wikipedia] |
1.3.2-1 | 20060808 | 20080804 | Brazilian Portugese, "Techisa Desktop Environment." Screenshot shows something that looks rather like Windows XP. Site had some issues 200803. | |
| TinyWM |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [wikipedia] |
1.3 | 20050310 | 20080824 | Nick Welch | 50 lines of C code, also available in Python. Also the author of Whimsy. Review |
| tmux |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
0.4 | 20080701 | 20080730 | Nicholas Marriott | BSD-licensed, terminal multiplexer (ie. similar to "screen" but newer). |
| Toy'd |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
2007-02-16 | 20070216 | 20080823 | De Kermadec Mathieu, Gaudart Germain, Laventure Kenfe-Mickael, Martin Matthieu, Vallat Arnaud, Malvert Laurent, Lin Ting-Ann | "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." And yet there's a binary package on offer? |
| treewm |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
0.4.5 | 20030915 | 20080804 | Thomas Jäger | "The user can create desktops which can themselves contain windows and desktops." Not intuitive. |
| tritium |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
0.3.5 | 20080613 | 20080804 | 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 | 20080729 | 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 | 20080804 | Nicolas Centa | "It is written in C++, mostly using safe programming techniques, uses midtalk and gtkmm. ... Its further goal is to implement the complete EWMH specification in order to be useable in modern desktop environments. tsubasa also includes mazeru, a program that is intended to become a compositing manager ..." |
| tvtwm |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
patchlevel 11 | 19950209 | 20080731 | 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" above is a direct link to a .tar.gz archive at X.org. |
| twin |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [wikipedia] |
0.6.0 | 20071201 | 20080824 | 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] |
1.00 final | 20070529 | 20080729 | Niall Moody | "Inspired by Tracktion, the multitrack audio editor/sequencer." Review (of previous version, 0.45b). Version 1.00 is the "final" the last release. Notes |
| TWM |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
1.0.4-2 (Debian testing) | 20080615 | 20080824 | 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] |
0.2.9b | 20041205 | 20080804 | Christian Ruppert | Unix Desktop Environment. "uwm" package under Debian testing. Unusual design. |
| UnWimp |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
Subversion only | 20080805 | Clive Crous | From one of the authors of evilpoison. He says 'It "steals" concepts/ideas from treewm, ratpoison and wmii to become what it will be.' A work in progress, his new website makes it essentially impossible to find the code. | |
| uwm |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
? | 19970213 | 20080804 | Digital Equipment Corporation, M. Gancarz, Loretta Guarino Reid. | "Universal" WM. "Very outdated, but is an excellent example of how to do simple window manager functions." Comment and source archive above are from xwinman.org. |
| Vtwm |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
5.4.7 | 20050628 | 20080804 | Tom LaStrange et al. | Extends TWM with a large (single) virtual desktop - like tvtwm. |
| VWM |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
1.3.5 | 20080321 | 20080804 | 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. |
| w9wm |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
0.4.2 | 20041223 | 20080729 | Benjamin Drieu. Based on David Hogan's 9wm. | Adds virtual desktops to 9wm. 2003 Review |
| Waimea |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
0.4.0 | 20021105 | 20080729 | David Reveman | Some code from Blackbox but not a fork, eye candy added. |
| WeeWM |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
0.0.2 | 20030707 | 20080804 | flashcode AT flashtux DOT org, xahlexx AT weeland DOT org, bounga AT altern DOT org. | Small, keyboard-oriented. |
| Whim |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
1147 | 20080304 | 20080729 | 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 | 20080804 | 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. |
| Wily |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
0.13.42 | 20060406 | 20080731 | 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 | 20080729 | 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." |
| WindowLab |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
1.34 | 20061112 | 20080804 | 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 | 20080805 | Alfredo Kojima, Dan Pascu. | Emulates NeXT's GUI. 2003 Review |
| wm2 |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
4 | 19970321 | 20080817 | 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 | 20080815 | Scott Barnes | Intended to work with (a very old version of) GNOME. "This project is abandoned." |
| WMI |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
10 | 20041003 | 20080824 | 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 | 20071116 | 20080726 | 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 or so: they now appear to have changed their minds. |
| wmx |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
6pl1 | 20011005 | 20080729 | Chris Cannam | Adds virtual desktops to wm2. May require some Google digging and source code patching to run on modern systems, but it's still a nice WM. 2003 Review Notes |
| wwm |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
2.0 | 19990212 | 20080805 | 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 | 20080815 | 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 | 20080805 | "oxygenic" | Incorporates a window server and manager in one, intended for embedded systems. Forked from Xynth. |
| xfwm |
[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia] |
4.4.2 | 20071117 | 20080823 | 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 | 20080804 |