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: WMFS (20081207).

Most recent updates: 20090105

Name	URLs	Version	Release date	Date checked	Authors	Notes
2wm	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.1	20070212	20081216	Anselm Garbe	"Stereo WM." Appeared to be a stripped/simplified version of dwm by the same author. He provided reasonably thorough documentation. The "homepage" listed here is the suckless.org "misc" download folder. 2wm has once again disappeared (20081009-1216) and may or may not reappear.
3Dwm	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	not available		20081221	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	not available	20081228		Similar to the proprietary Silicon Graphics IRIX 4Dwm. Webpage vanished ~200705. Domain is still in existence.
9wm	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	1.1	19960208	20081213	David Hogan	Imitates the 8-1/2 WM (Plan 9 OS). See also w9wm (which adds virtual desktops) and rio, which claims to be a more exact imitation. Often used as a code base for other WMs. 2003 Review
Aegis	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	SVN	20060411	20081228	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]	1.3.12	20071227	20081231	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	20090105	Sasha Vasko	"Originally based on the look and feel of the NeXTStep interface."
AHWM	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.90	20020224	20081228	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	20081228	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		20081213		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	20081213	AlpT	"This is my custom, window manager. It's small, functional and fast. It is based on dwm ..."
amaterus	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	not available		20090105	Hiroyuki Komatsu	GTK-based. Screen shots all show GNOME toolbar. Source (last known version 0.34.1 dated 20021124) is MIA.
AmiWM	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.20pl48	19980315	20090105	Marcus Comstedt	Imitates the Amiga Workbench. Has its own "Generic amiwm License."
Anarchy	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.1.0.1	20050720	20081229	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	20090105	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	20090105	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	20080918	20081207	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	20081213	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	20081216	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	20081216	Robert Annessi	Website: "Not actively maintained." Minimalist, no decorations.
Beryl	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.2.1	20070317	20081229	Quinn_Storm, Dennis Kasprzyk, Nicholas Thomas, Robert Carr, Nigel Cunningham, Kristian Lyngstøl	Fork of the graphics-heavy Compiz. Compiz and Beryl have partly re-merged (starting ~200705) to create Compiz Fusion.
Blackbox	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.70.1	20051103	20081216	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	20081219	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	20081229	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]	0809	20080923	20081207	Philippe Brochard	"Based on TinyWM and Stumpwm." Written entirely in Common Lisp, requires a lisp interpreter.
Compiz	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.6.2	20071018	20081207		Extremely attractive and graphics-intensive. Compiz and Beryl are re-merging (200705?) but action on this has been slow. See Compiz Fusion.
Compiz Fusion	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.6.0	20071020	20081208		"Compiz Fusion is the result of a merge between the well-known Beryl composite window manager and Compiz Extras, a community set of improvements to the Compiz composite window manager." They consider it alpha.
CTWM	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	3.8a	20070216	20081229	Claude Lecommandeur	Adds virtual desktops and even more configurability to TWM. 2003 Review
cwm	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	release 3	20050828	20081229	Marius Aamodt Eriksen	Originally based on evilwm, now written from scratch.
dvtm	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.4.1	20080510	20081213	Marc Andre Tanner	Dynamic Virtual Terminal Manager: "dvtm brings dwm and its concept of tiling window management to the console." Borrowed some code from dwm. Text only. MIT/X Consortium License. Notes
dwemo	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.0.2	20080517	20081220	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]	5.3.1	20081206	20081229	Anselm Garbe	"Dynamic Window Manager," another keyboard-driven WM from the wmii people. "Because dwm is customized through editing its source code, it's pointless to make binary packages of it. This keeps its userbase small and elitist. No novices asking stupid questions." Version 5.2 source package 18kb. 4.8 on is supposed to include Xinerama support, I haven't checked. MIT license.
echinus wm	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.3.2.1	20081207	20081231	Alexander Polakov	Based on the same author's fwm, which was based on dwm's code base and took some ideas from Plan 9's rio. It's "in the spirit of dwm."
Eclipse	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	not available		20081213	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	20081208	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	20081213	Serdar Öaut;zler.	Turkish. Development has ceased. Written in C++.
Elevate	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.2.0	20071118	20081208	Kostis Kapelonis	Part of "Project Elevate" to simplify our complex UIs. Requires a couple other components to complete the project.
Enlightenment	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.16.8.14	20080809	20081208	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	20081220	Students at EPITA in France.	"Small, fast, light." School project. Appears fairly themeable.
EvilPoison	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	git(?) only		20081229	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	20081208	Ciaran Anscomb	Minimalistic keyboard driven WM with vi- and nethack-like key bindings. 2003 Review
expocity	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	not available		20081211		Applied Apple Exposé-like behaviour to Metacity. Development discontinued around 2005: "This version is now outdated and the modern X window system nowadays allows for much better effects than what was possible with expocity." Web page deceased: last known address: http://www.pycage.de/#expocity .
failsafewm						Bundled with swm. See swm.
Firebox	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.5.0	20080123	20081229	Cyrille Bagard	Written from scratch in C, inspired by Fluxbox, HackedBox, Blackbox, Enlightenment, and WindowLab, but particularly by Openbox and wmii. Notes
Fluxbox	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	1.0.0	20071008	20081229	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	20081211	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	20081229	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.
Framer	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.1	20030421	20081211	Christoph Dietze	Written in old version of Eiffel and requires wxWindows (probably an old version), meant to go with ROX. Appears to be abandoned, ROX has moved on. Requires wxWindows.
fvwm	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	1.24r	19950726	20081213	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	20081213	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	20081211	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	20081211	Maciej Delmanowski	fvwm2 dressed up to look and act even better. Requires a recent version of fvwm2. Website down 20081118-1211 (or longer). Freshmeat has a download link.
fwm	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	not available		20081229	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 given.
fxwm	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.1.12	20061128	20081211	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]	2.24	200809	20081221		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	20081211	Orig. Jordan DeLong, now Bruce Ashfield.	Nice looking, promising project with extremely infrequent code releases. 2003 Review
gwm	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	2.0	20050328	20081213	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	20081213	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	20081213	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	20081231	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	20081213	argonaut_@yahoo.com	mlvwm (Macintosh-8/9-alike) modified - very black and white.
heliwm	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	1.13	20060303	20081213	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	20071227	20081208	Originally Marko Macek, also Mathias Hasselmann.	Written (in C++) to emulate OS/2 and Windows 95/98, but it's grown. Themeable and has virtual desktops. 2003 Review
Integrity	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	1.0	20040711	20081213	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.
Interface	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.2.5	20030914	20081213	Ian Mondragon	Written in Objective C for GNUstep.
Ion	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	3-20081002	20081002	20081229	Tuomo Valkonen	Keyboard-driven framing tabbed WM. Successor to PWM. 2003 Review
JD4X	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.6	20060201	20081213	Tay Hock Keong, Brandon Tay, Joseph Gledhill, Marc Patteet, Christopher R.	Java Desktop 4 X.
Jewel	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.12.40	20020823	20081214	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	20081219	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	20081208	Joe Wingbermuehle	Joe's WM - young, buggy, similar to IceWM and Windows 98.
Kahakai	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.6.2	20040207	20081230	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	20081214	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]	4.1.3	20081105	20081221		KDE (unlike its best known competitor) does include a Window Manager, kwm. Famous, big, pretty. 4.1.x is widely announced and used, but apparently not considered "stable." That honour goes to the 3.5.x series.
larswm	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	7.5.3	20040715	20090101	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.
Looking Glass 3D	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	1.0	20061219	20081219	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	20081230	Vincent Povirk	MIT license tiling WM intended for GNOME. Written in C, requires GTK and XLib.
lwm	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	1.2.1	20040930	20081213	Originally Elliott Hughes. Maintenance by James Carter.	"Lightweight" WM, fairly minimal decorations.
Luminocity	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	?		20081214		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	20081219	Manuel Carrasco	Not a WM. "LXP is a desktop enviroment identical to Windows XP. LXP is a collection of different pieces of GNU software (IceWM, xfe, idesk, etc) modified in order to look and feel identical to Windows XP."
maewm	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	not available		20081213		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	20081208	Magnus Sjöstrand	Mac OS 8/9-alike.
Matchbox	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	1.2	20070413	20090101	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	20081220	Martin Vollrathson	No connection to OS X despite name. Based on wm2. As of 200808 the front page won't link to the downloads so it's effectively unavailable.
Metacity	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	2.25.55	20081216	20081221	"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]	0.4.1	20081209	20081220	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.
Mezzo	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	2008.1	20080417	20090104	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	20090104	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	20081213	Takahashi Hasegawa	Macintosh like virtual WM. (The website is so old it uses the <blink> tag.)
Mosquito	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.5.43	20011206	20081221	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	20081213	Grant Wallace et al	Supports multiple simultaneous users. Based on IceWM.
MPWM	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	git	?	20081220	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	20081230	"Hungry Programmers"	M*tif WM re-implemented by the Hungry Programmers - part of the Lesstif package. 2003 Review
NovaWM	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	Alpha-0.8	20021225	20090104	"realmz"	Looks like it takes its hints from Blackbox?
olvwm	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	4.5	20030922	20081213	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		20081216	Sun Microsystems (many patches applied since public release).	Sun olwm. No homepage(?), available with some distros. While this appears to be copyrighted by Sun and not GPL, Linux programmers are maintaining it? Debian testing package listed.
OmegaWM	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.2.1	20050413	20081213	Hyriand	The author, "Hyriand," also worked on Kahakai. Requires SConstruct, Cairo, ImLib2.
Openbox	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	3.4.7.2	20080423	20081214	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	20081219	David Frese, Norbert Freudemann.	Written in scsh. Similar behaviour to Ion. Still mentioned at the scsh pages: some or all links to the WM itself are periodically broken.
OroboROX	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.9.7.9	20050829	20081210		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.
Oroborus	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	2.0.18	20060112	20081220	orig. Ken Lynch, later Stefan Pfetzing.	Minimalist, includes utilities to bind keys and launch applications.
Parti	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.0.5	20081102	20090104	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	20081228	David Gómez Espinosa, Raúl Núñez de Arenas Coronado.	Puto Amo Window Manager. Small.
PekWM	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.1.9	20081221	20081221	Claes Nästén	Based on aewm++ with window grouping like PWM and Fluxbox. I rather like this WM.
PerlWM	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.0.7	20040523	20090104	Rich Williams(?)	Written in Perl. Not very stable or usable.
Phluid	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.0.3	20001113	20081213	Matthew M. Elder	Declared dead by developer 200304. Used Imlib2, aimed for ICCCM compliance. BSD License.
piewm	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	1.04	20060314	20081230		tvtwm modified to use pie menus - an early rudimentary implementation of mouse gestures.
PLWM	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	SVN only		20090104	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. Old packages seem to have disappeared so SVN only.
Puppet	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.3	20080213	20090105	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	20081210	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 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	20081207	Vincent Rasneur, Anaëaut;l Verrier.	Written in Python.
Pyro Desktop	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.1	20070718	20081207	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	20081207	orig. David Mcnab, now Elmo Mäntynen.	A modification of FLWM scriptable in Python. Author says it's a very early version.
qlwm	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	4.3	20080821	20081213	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.
quarkwm	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	3_200710022054	20071002	20081210	FC	Keyboard-driven, some similarities to Ratpoison. The source code appears to be totally uncommented.
qvwm	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	1.1.12	20020217	20081230	Kenichi Kourai	Windows 95-alike. Written from scratch in C++. Many of the download links are broken, looks like you can still get the source (in an rpm). 2003 Review
Ratpoison	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	1.4.3	20080219	20081214	Shawn Betts	Tiling keyboard-driven minimalist WM with emacs- and screen-like key bindings. 2003 Review
rio	[homepage] [Freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	20081207	20080815	20081207	Russ Cox	Derived from 9wm, and intended to be more like Bell's original Rio. Wikipedia article relates to Bell Lab's Plan 9's original rio, but mentions this one. To get the source you have to search links to download the whole of "Plan 9 From User Space" (plan9port, 20+MB). The date I give is for the most recent release of plan9port.
ROX Desktop	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]					Not a WM: ROX is a file manager imitating the RISC OS GUI that manages your desktop on top of a WM (currently OroboROX).
s3d	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.2.1	20080827	20081207	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	20081228	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]	1.3.4	20080829	20081214		Formerly titled "sawmill." Highly scriptable through a LISP derivative. Was for some time the WM of GNOME. Dead 2003-2006, now appears to be in active development again.
screen	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	4.0.3	20080807	20081221	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	20081230	Greg J. Badros, Maciej Stachowiak, et al.	"Scheme Constraints" WM. Configurable with a Guile Scheme language.
SithWM	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	1.2.3	20080425	20081210	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	20081228	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]	0.9.5	20081021	20081221	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	?	20081219	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 Ruby (was Lua until about 200809). "subtler" provides similar functionality to that wmctrl provides for EWMH WMs.
Sugar	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	?	?	20081228	"The OLPC Team"	Not a WM. The interface for the OLPC, written in Python. Runs on top of Matchbox. Seems to include instructions for building and using it on many distros. Fetch and build is done with jbuild, which obscures the current version, and it doesn't look easy.
swm	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	?	19930929	20081219	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	20081221	Robert Sperling	Small WM. Based on aewm, tries for ICCCM and GNOME compliance.
TAL/wm	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.0.2	20080519	20081210	Nolan Liebert	"TAL/wm is a Tiling Application Launcher/window manager for X. Currently TAL/wm is based loosely on the dynamic window manager (dwm) code. The goal [was] to be even more minimal and equally as customizable." MIT License. Same author as dwemo and AntiWM. Author Nolan Liebert says he's not going to maintain TAL/wm "as I really don't think we need more forks of dwm anymore." Source code is gone 200809.
TDE	[homepage] [freshmeat] [wikipedia]	1.3.2-1	20060808	20081210		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	20081221	Nick Welch	50 lines of C code, also available in Python. Also the author of Whimsy. Review
tmux	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.5	20081117	20081221	Nicholas Marriott	BSD-licensed, terminal multiplexer (ie. similar to "screen" but newer).
Toy'd	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	2007-02-16	20070216	20081219	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	20081207	Thomas Jäger	"The user can create desktops which can themselves contain windows and desktops." Not intuitive.
tritium	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.3.5	20080613	20081207	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	20081228	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	20081207	Nicolas Centa	"It is written in C++, mostly using safe programming techniques, uses midtalk and gtkmm." Plans to implement EWMH. "... tsubasa also includes mazeru, a program that is intended to become a compositing manager ... It is recommanded that you use Xephyr in order to test tsubasa, as it is not very stable at the moment."
tvtwm	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	patchlevel 11	19950209	20081231	Chris Ross, orig. Tom LaStrange	Tom's Virtual Tab WM (the virtual desktop is a viewport to one large area) version of TWM. The "homepage" listed is a direct link to a .tar.gz archive at X.org.
twin	[homepage] [freshmeat] [wikipedia]	0.6.0	20071201	20081221	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	20081228	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	20081231	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	20081207	Christian Ruppert	Unix Desktop Environment. "uwm" package under Debian testing. Unusual design.
UnWimp	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	Subversion only		20081210	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	20081207	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	20081207	Tom LaStrange et al.	Extends TWM with a large (single) virtual desktop - like tvtwm.
VWM	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	1.3.5	20080321	20081207	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	20081228	Benjamin Drieu. Based on David Hogan's 9wm.	Adds virtual desktops to 9wm. 2003 Review
Waimea	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.4.0	20021105	20081228	David Reveman	Some code from Blackbox but not a fork, eye candy added.
WeeWM	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.0.2	20030707	20081207	flashcode AT flashtux DOT org, xahlexx AT weeland DOT org, bounga AT altern DOT org.	Small, keyboard-oriented.
Whim	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	2284	20081221	20081228	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	20081207	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	20090101	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	20081231	Martin Grabmüller	Limited decorations, small. Requires Sizzle Scheme interpreter. "... heavily inspired by aewm ... key bindings are taken from evilwm ... style of window resizing came from TWM."
Window Manager From Scratch (WMFS)	[homepage] [freshmeat] [Wikipedia]	0.1rc3	20081123	20081221	Martin Duquesnoy (code), Marc Lagrange (build system "and other")	"The goal of this project is to make a very basic, lightweight and dynamic WM." Tiling, BSD license, not currently stable.
WindowLab	[homepage]