Window manager
Not to be confused with display manager.
Resources
The window manager Article description::manages the creation, manipulation, and destruction of on-screen windows. Each system with an X server installed should have a window manager.
Classification
Windows managers can be dynamic, stacking, or tiling in their behavior.
- Stacking window managers behave analogously to pieces of paper on a physical desktop, they can be stacked on top of one another, with the one at the top of the stack being the one with which the user sees and interacts.
- Tiling window managers represent windows as tiles, or split views, with windows displayed next to one another, but with none of the windows overlapping.
- Dynamic window managers are window managers that can dynamically switch between the previous two paradigms.
Available software
Here are some window manager packages available in Gentoo:
| Name | Package | Homepage | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| aewm | x11-wm/aewm | 404 (bug #708484) | A minimalistic, dynamic X11 window manager. |
| aewm++ | x11-wm/aewm++ | https://github.com/frankhale/aewmpp | A dynamic window manager with more modern features than aewm but with the same look and feel. |
| amiwm | x11-wm/amiwm | https://www.lysator.liu.se/~marcus/amiwm.html | A stacking window manager that resembles the Amiga Workbench user interface. |
| awesome | x11-wm/awesome | https://awesomewm.org/ | a highly configurable, next generation, dynamic window manager for X. |
| blackbox | x11-wm/blackbox | https://github.com/bradleythughes/blackbox | an open-source stacking window manager written in C++ and licensed under the MIT License |
| bspwm | x11-wm/bspwm | https://github.com/baskerville/bspwm | a lightweight, tiling, minimalist window manager that is written in C and represents its windows as leaves on a binary tree. |
| CTWM | x11-wm/ctwm | https://www.ctwm.org/index.html | A lightweight, stacking window manager. |
| cwm | x11-wm/cwm | https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/xenocara/app/cwm/ | A lightweight, stacking window manager originally developed for OpenBSD. |
| dwm | x11-wm/dwm | https://dwm.suckless.org/ | a dynamic window manager for X11. |
| echinus | x11-wm/echinus | https://plhk.ru/ | A lightweight tiling and floating window manager forked from dwm. |
| Enlightenment | x11-wm/enlightenment | https://www.enlightenment.org/ | an eye-candy, compositing and stacking window manager that is released under the permissive BSD License. |
| evilwm | x11-wm/evilwm | https://www.6809.org.uk/evilwm/ | A lightweight, stacking window manager. |
| fluxbox | x11-wm/fluxbox | http://fluxbox.org/ | an open-source stacking window manager for X11 that was originally forked from Blackbox. |
| FVWM | x11-wm/fvwm | http://www.fvwm.org/ | a stacking window manager for X11. |
| goomwwm | x11-wm/goomwwm | https://github.com/seanpringle/goomwwm | Get out of my way, Window Manager! |
| herbstluftwm | x11-wm/herbstluftwm | https://herbstluftwm.org/ | a manual tiling window manager for X11 using Xlib and Glib |
| JWM | x11-wm/jwm | https://github.com/joewing/jwm | an extremely lightweight window manager for the X window system. |
| i3 | x11-wm/i3 | https://i3wm.org/ | a minimalist tiling window manager, completely written from scratch. |
| IceWM | x11-wm/icewm | https://ice-wm.org/ | a free and open-source, lightweight, stacking window manager for X11. |
| KWin | kde-plasma/kwin | https://userbase.kde.org/KWin | KDE's compositing window manager. |
| larswm | x11-wm/larswm | http://porneia.free.fr/larswm/larswm.html | A tiling window manager for X11, based on 9wm. |
| lwm | x11-wm/lwm | http://www.jfc.org.uk/software/lwm.html | A lightweight, stacking window manager. |
| Marco | x11-wm/marco | https://github.com/mate-desktop/marco | MATE's window manager, forked from Metacity, the window manager of GNOME 2. |
| matwm2 | x11-wm/matwm2 | https://github.com/segin/matwm2 | Simple EWMH compatible window manager with titlebars and frames. |
| Muffin | x11-wm/muffin | https://github.com/linuxmint/muffin | Cinnamon's compositing window manager. |
| Musca | x11-wm/musca | https://launchpad.net/musca | A simple dynamic window manager, with features nicked from ratpoison and dwm. |
| Mutter | x11-wm/mutter | https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/ | GNOME's compositing window manager. |
| Notion | x11-wm/notion | http://notion.sourceforge.net/ | A tiling, tabbed window manager for X11. |
| Openbox | x11-wm/openbox | http://openbox.org/ | a highly configurable, next generation, stacking window manager for X11 with extensive standards support. |
| oroborus | x11-wm/oroborus | https://www.oroborus.org/ | A small and fast window manager. |
| page | x11-wm/page | https://www.hzog.net/index.php/Main_Page | A mouse-friendly tiling window manager. |
| PekWM | x11-wm/pekwm | https://pekwm.org/ | A lightweight, dynamic window manager originally forked from aewm++. |
| Qtile | x11-wm/qtile | http://www.qtile.org/ | an open-source, tiling window manager that is written in and extended with the Python programming language |
| ratpoison | x11-wm/ratpoison | https://nongnu.org/ratpoison/ | a tiling window manager modeled after screen. |
| Sawfish | x11-wm/sawfish | https://sawfish.tuxfamily.org/ | an extensible window manager using a Lisp-based scripting language. |
| Sith WM | x11-wm/sithwm | https://sithwm.darkside.no/ | A minimalist window manager for X11. |
| spectrwm | x11-wm/spectrwm | http://srobb.net/spectrwm.html | A small dynamic tiling window manager for X11. |
| StumpWM | x11-wm/stumpwm | https://stumpwm.github.io/ | A tiling window manager written entirely in Common Lisp. |
| Subtle | x11-wm/subtle | https://subforge.org/projects/subtle/wiki | A simple tiling window manager. |
| twm | x11-wm/twm | https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/app/twm | A simple stacking window manager started written in C. |
| WindowLab | x11-wm/windowlab | https://github.com/nickgravgaard/windowlab | A small and simple window manager of novel design. |
| Window Maker | x11-wm/windowmaker | http://www.windowmaker.org/ | The fast and light GNUstep window manager. |
| wm2 | x11-wm/wm2 | https://www.all-day-breakfast.com/wm2/ | a minimalist window manager for X11 |
| Xfwm | xfce-base/xfwm4 | https://docs.xfce.org/xfce/xfwm4/start | Xfce's compositing window manager. |
| xmonad | x11-wm/xmonad | https://xmonad.org/ | a fast and lightweight tiling window manager for X11 |
feh and imv can be used for setting the desktop background for tiling window managers like i3. See a full and current list of window managers by issuing (requires app-portage/eix):
user $eix --category x11-wmSee also
- Desktop environment — An article listing desktop environments available in Gentoo Linux.
- Display manager — An article listing display managers available in Gentoo Linux.
External resources
- Comparison of X window managers (Wikipedia)
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