About
The window manager manages the creation, manipulation, and destruction of on-screen windows and window decorations in Xorg.
Each X-server installation should usually have a window manager. If a desktop environment is used, a window manager will generally be provided.
Classification
Windows managers can generally be dynamic, stacking or tiling in their behavior.
- Stacking (or floating) window managers have windows analogous to pieces of paper on a physical desktop, which can be stacked each on top of the others, with the one with which the user interacts on top of the stack, and totally visible.
- 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 can dynamically switch between the other two paradigms.
Windows managers can integrate a compositor, for buffering graphics before showing them, allowing visual effects, anti-flicker and other facilities.
Available window managers
| Package-Name | Homepage / Source-Repository | Description |
|---|---|---|
| awesome | https://awesomewm.org/ | Highly configurable, next generation, dynamic window manager for X. |
| blackbox | https://github.com/bradleythughes/blackbox | Free and libre stacking window manager written in C++ and licensed under the MIT License. |
| bspwm | https://github.com/baskerville/bspwm | Lightweight, tiling, minimalist window manager that is written in C and represents its windows as leaves on a binary tree. |
| cwm | https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/xenocara/app/cwm/ | Lightweight, stacking window manager originally developed for OpenBSD. |
| fluxbox | http://www.fluxbox.org | Free software stacking window manager for X11 that was originally forked from Blackbox. |
| fvwm | http://www.fvwm.org/ | Stacking window manager for X11. |
| herbstluftwm | https://herbstluftwm.org/ | Manual tiling window manager for X11 using Xlib and Glib. |
| jwm | http://joewing.net/projects/jwm/ | Extremely lightweight window manager for the X window system. |
| i3-wm | https://i3wm.org/ | Minimalist tiling window manager, completely written from scratch. |
| icewm | https://ice-wm.org/ | Free and libre, lightweight, stacking window manager for X11. |
| notion | http://notion.sourceforge.net/ | Tabbed and tiling window manager. |
| openbox | https://github.com/danakj/openbox | Highly configurable, next generation, stacking window manager for X11 with extensive standards support. |
| pekwm | https://pekwm.org/ | Lightweight, dynamic window manager originally forked from aewm++. |
| ratpoison | https://www.nongnu.org/ratpoison/ | Tiling window manager modeled after screen. |
| sawfish | https://sawfish.fandom.com/wiki/Main_Page | Extensible window manager using a Lisp-based scripting language. |
| twm | https://www.xenocara.org/ | Simple stacking window manager started written in C. |
| uwm | https://uwm.sourceforge.io/ | Micro (u) and Stacking Window Manager. |
Acknowledgement
This wiki article is based on information from Gentoo and Wikipedia.