- fvwm, developed by Robert
Nation then maintained by Charles K. Hines, Brady Montz and now a
collective effort, seems to be the most ubiquitous of the virtual
window-managers in use (especially in the Linux community,; hey,
Linus uses it). It borrows heavily from Tom LaStrange's famous
twm window manager. (Actually, any self-respecting window-manager
will borrow from twm since it was the first ICCCM-compliant
window-manager to be written. It should also be noted that Tom
LaStrange also wrote the first virtual window-manager (swm) for
Solbourne Corp. (is this guy brilliant or what?))
fvwm is a derivative of twm, redesigned to minimize memory
consumption, provide a 3-D look (indistinguishable from Motif's mwm)
and provide a simple virtual desktop.
The latest version of fvwm is available at:
http://www.fvwm.org/download.html
- piewm, developed by Don Hopkins, is a virtual window manager with
the look-and-feel of tvtwm, with the additional of pie-shaped menus.
It is available for ftp from:
ftp.x.org:/R5contrib/piewm.tar.Z
- vtwm is a
virtual window manager with the look-and-feel of twm. Now maintained
by D.J. Hawkey Jr. It sports a configurable 3D look, supports XPM
images, multi-headed systems and is still backward compatible with
twm for the purists. It is available from:
ftp://ftp.visi.com/users/hawkeyd/X/vtwm-5.4.5a.tar.gz
- olvwm, developed by Scott Oaks, is a virtual window manager with
the look-and-feel of OpenLook (Sun's windowing environment). It is
available for ftp from:
ftp.x.org:/R5contrib/olvwm4.tar.Z
- ctwm, developed by Claude Lecommandeur, is an extension to twm,
that features up to 32 multiple virtual screens, called workspaces.
You switch from one workspace to another either by clicking on a
button in an optional panel of buttons (the workspace manager) or by
invoking a function. Each workspace can be customize by choosing
different colors, names, and pixmaps for the buttons and root
windows. It also features:
- optional 3D window titles and border (ala Motif);
- shaped, colored icons;
- multiple icons for clients based on the icon name;
- windows that can belong to several workspaces;
- a map of your workspaces to quickly move windows between
different workspaces;
- icons, root backgrounds and buttons that can be animated;
- pinnable and sticky menus.
The latest version of ctwm, 3.5, is available for ftp from:
ftp.x.org:/contrib/window_managers/ctwm-3.5.tar.Z
- GWM, developed by
Colas Nahaboo, is an extensible Window Manager for the X Window
System that is customized using a dialect of Lisp. This was the
very first WM I was exposed to on a Sun 386i and I enjoyed
immensely the ability to configure it in infinite dimensions
(very much like the Emacs editor) and its ability to display
milti-colour pixmaps in the title-bar. However, at the time, it
was very buggy and I settled on twm, which I used until recently
(1998); I now use fvwm2. The author has fixed the bugs and it
should be very stable now. If you are a hacker, this is the WM
for you.
The latest version, 1.8, is avilable at:
ftp://koala.inria.fr/pub/gwm
- Scwm, is the Scheme
Constraints Window Manager, jointly developed by Greg J. Badros and
Maciej Stachowiak. This is a highly dynamic and extensible window
manager and scripting facility for X, based on fvwm2 (fvwm2 modules
are supported), but now much enhanced with Guile Scheme
as the configuration/extension language. Nearly all decorations can
be changed at run-time or per-window and support for Themes is
included. The .scwmrc configuration file can be edited in Emacs, and
the results evaluated immediately, without restarting. You'll also
enjoy using this wm if you are a hacker; it also has some neat new
features like the constraint-based window-layout system.
Note:
you have to install Guile to use this wm.
The latest version (stable alpha) is available at:
ftp://scwm.mit.edu/pub/scwm/scwm-0.99.2.tar.gz
Various binary RPMs are available at: ftp://scwm.mit.edu/pub/scwm/RPMS/