spectrwm Alternatives
spectrwm
spectrwm is a small dynamic tiling window manager for X11. It tries to stay out of the way so that valuable screen real estate can be used for much more important stuff. It has sane defaults and does not require one to learn a language to do any configuration. It was written by hackers for hackers and it strives to be small, compact and fast.
It was largely inspired by xmonad and dwm. Both are fine products but suffer from things like: crazy-unportable-language-syndrome, silly defaults, asymmetrical window layout, "how hard can it be?" and good old NIH. Nevertheless dwm was a phenomenal resource and many good ideas and code was borrowed from it. On the other hand xmonad has great defaults, key bindings and xinerama support but is crippled by not being written in C.
Spectrwm is a beautiful pearl! For it too, was created by grinding irritation. Nothing is a bigger waste of time than moving windows around until they are the right size-ish or having just about any relevant key combination being eaten for some task one never needs. The path of agony is too long to quote and in classical OpenBSD fashion (put up, or hack up) a brand new window manager was whooped up to serve no other purpose than to obey its masters. It was written by Marco Peereboom, Ryan Thomas McBride & Darrin Chandler and it is released under the ISC license. Patches can be accepted provided they are ISC licensed as well.
Best spectrwm Alternatives
Need an alternative to spectrwm? Read on. We've looked at the best spectrwm alternatives available for Windows, Mac and Android.
Openbox
FreeOpen SourceLinuxBSDOpenbox is a highly configurable, next generation window manager with extensive standards support.
i3
FreeOpen SourceLinuxBSDA dynamic tiling window manager designed for X11, inspired by wmii, and written in C.
Features:
- Tiling Window Manager
- Lightweight
- Tiling
- X server
Fluxbox
FreeOpen SourceLinuxBSDC++Fluxbox is a window manager for X that was based on the Blackbox 0.61.1 code. It is very light on resources and easy to handle but yet full of features to make an easy...
awesome
FreeOpen SourceLinuxBSDA dynamic window manager for the X Window System developed in the C and Lua programming languages. .
Features:
- Extensible window manager
- Tiling
- X server
Xmonad
FreeOpen SourceMacLinuxxmonad is a dynamically tiling X11 window manager that is written and configured in Haskell. In a normal WM, you spend half your time aligning and searching for windows....
Features:
- Extensible window manager
- Tiling
- X server
dwm
FreeOpen SourceLinuxBSDdwm is a dynamic window manager for X. It manages windows in tiled, monocle and floating layouts. All of the layouts can be applied dynamically, optimising the...
Features:
- Lightweight
- X server
Amethyst
FreeOpen SourceMacAmethyst is a tiling window manager for Mac similar to the xmonad tiling window manager popular on Linux. Amethyst is written in Objective-C and has configurable...
Features:
- Tiling Layouts
- Support for Keyboard Shortcuts
- Tiling
Bluetile
FreeOpen SourceLinuxBluetile is a tiling window manager for Linux, designed to integrate with the GNOME desktop environment. It provides both a traditional, stacking layout mode as well as...
IceWM
FreeOpen SourceLinuxBSDIceWM is a Window Manager for X Window System. It is fast and memory-efficient, and it provides many different looks including Windows'95, OS/2 Warp 3,4, Motif.
Sway
FreeOpen SourceLinuxSway is a tiling Wayland compositor and a drop-in replacement for the i3 window manager for X11.
Features:
- Tiling
- Tiling Layouts
- Tiling Window Manager
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