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Window manager
From Gentoo Wiki (test)
Not to be confused with display manager.
Resources
Each system with an X server installed should have a window manager. The window manager manages the creation, manipulation, and destruction of on-screen windows.
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 that the user sees and interacts with. 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 these two paradigms.
Available software
Here are some window manager packages available in Gentoo:
| Name | Package | Homepage | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| aewm | x11-wm/aewm | https://www.red-bean.com/decklin/aewm/ | 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. |
| AfterStep | x11-wm/afterstep | http://www.afterstep.org/ | A feature rich, stacking NeXTish window manager. |
| 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 | http://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 window manager, focusing on keyboard commands to manipulate windows. |
| 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 | http://ratpoison.nongnu.org/ | 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 | http://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://www.x.org/wiki/ | 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.