
Comparison of X Window Managers - _of
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_X_window_managers
======
derekp7
I really wish the full potential of compositing window managers could have
been fulfilled, instead of the tech behind them being used for mostly eye
candy.

Here are two items that should be doable with compositing. First, when giving
a presentation with an external monitor, I'd like to tag specific windows to
be mirrored (and scaled, if appropriate) on the secondary monitor. That way I
can still be messing with my instant messages or email in private (which you
can't do if you are mirroring your whole screen), yet be able to easily work
with content that the audience is also viewing (by no having to shift my head
from my laptop screen up to the projector all the time). This would be similar
to using online meeting software where you share specific windows.

The second item, that you can sort of do now but not cleanly, is have multiple
mice and keyboards, so that a mouse that selects a given window gives its
associated keyboard input focus to that window. While the other mouse/keyboard
combo is working with a different window. This would be great for pair
programming, especially with a multi-windowed shared buffer editor (like what
Emacs can do).

You can do this now, with some editing in the X config file, but there is no
indication on the screen which window currently is focused to which keyboard
-- this can be accomplished with the WM changing the window border or title
bar color as appropriate.

~~~
microcolonel
This sort of thing is extremely difficult on X, but very doable on Wayland.
I've been thinking about putting broadcast/streaming functionality directly
into a compositor, so that your presentations/scenes could be composited
separately from your actual windows. Think OBS, but the components/layers of
the presentation are Wayland surfaces, and vice-versa, the windows are layers
of the presentation. In this sort of system, the compositing can easily happen
on the GPU, and can be accelerated like any desktop compositing.

~~~
Crinus
> This sort of thing is extremely difficult on X, but very doable on Wayland.

I'd say it is the other way around. With Wayland you'd need buy-in from the
entire stack since in Wayland everything needs to be implemented in the
compositor. With X all you need is a compositor (not necessary even your
window manager, it can be a separate compositor) that ignores the area of one
monitor when compositing and instead renders duplicates of the tagged windows
there. You can keep using everything else you were already using.

~~~
newnewpdro
I'm not clear on how this would happen on wayland as I haven't done any
development on it yet, but with X it would be tricky since the server still
has the window hierarchy state for event routing etc.

If you simply mirrored redirected windows in triplicate all over the place in
the compositor, it wouldn't magically make the window manager and X server
aware of all those areas as being windows to manage and route events at. You'd
just have these ghost windows that can't be directly interacted with as first-
class windows.

~~~
badsectoracula
> You'd just have these ghost windows that can't be directly interacted with
> as first-class windows.

But that is what the GP asked for, not full duplication.

Though if you want duplication it might be possible by creating a window over
the duplicated area that the compositor does not render but still grabs all
input events that are then forwarded to the original windows via XSendEvent.

------
alxlaz
If anyone wants a trip down the memory lane,
[http://www.xwinman.org/](http://www.xwinman.org/) is still up.

A long, long time ago -- but still quite some time after it stopped being
(too) regularly maintained -- I emailed Matt Chapman to ask him to include my
WM in the list. He never answered, thank God, that was my first piece of non-
trivial X11 code and it was absolutely gruesome, I don't know what the hell I
was thinking.

~~~
z5h
It's a miracle we could ever choose just one and get to work. Back in my Linux
days it was PWM for me.
[https://tuomov.iki.fi/software/](https://tuomov.iki.fi/software/)

~~~
alxlaz
WindowMaker, then FVWM were my drugs. I used tiling window managers for a
while, when my typical workstation was a laptop, but now that I have a large-
ish screen (27") on a desktop they're pretty bad -- everything is either too
wide to be useful, or too narrow. Ratpoison was definitely my favourite (I
also use Emacs, figures...), but I liked wmii, too. By the time I ran into pwm
I was hooked into Ratpoison :).

LXQT does its job for me these days. It's not the most polished but at least
it doesn't go out of its way to make my desktop look and act like a tablet so
I'm happy with it.

I've been toying with writing a Wayland compositor that does wmii-like tiling,
but can also do proper floating window management, but I have to wait for
things to settle on the Wayland front before writing anything that's useful...

Edit: whoever downvoted you _clearly_ never had a few hours of fun on a Friday
night tweaking FVWM only to find out it's 4 AM now and oh crap it's also
Monday!

~~~
signa11
still using fvwm2, haven’t found anything that comes close.

~~~
itsmenow
so do I. Although I discovered it rather late - in 2004. It's remarkable how
configurable it is. I adopted some version of what this guy did:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdSgf-
IykIo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdSgf-IykIo) to do "manual tiling".
Also can't find anything modern that even remotely can compare.

------
mseidl
I was a long time KDE user, then went to light weight wm I switched around
from fluxbox, openbox. Then I went to tiling window managers. Which is where
I'm at today. I have a screen shot of my old xmonad setup..
[http://i.imgur.com/c4HGAEs.png](http://i.imgur.com/c4HGAEs.png)

But now I'm using i3, as managing haskell crap is kind of a pita.

~~~
techntoke
Might I suggest Sway when you're ready to make the transition to Wayland.

~~~
coleifer
Implying that switching is inevitable.

~~~
tapoxi
Haven't the Xorg developers expressed interest in deprecating it? Sure,
someone could take up the mantle to continue working on Xorg, but it sounds
similar to staying on Python 2.

~~~
Crinus
Unlike Python 2 not everyone among the Xorg developers want to drop it (e.g.
Keith Packard doesn't seem very interested in Wayland). Also Xorg isn't really
one thing, it is a bunch of different subprojects with the server being the
one that is mostly referred to. Even if everything else stays exactly the
same, the X server will still need to be updated since it also works as
XWayland.

Finally unlike Python 2 vs 3 the difference between Xorg and Wayland is
tremendous, so i can easily see people who will be willing to fork it to
continue development.

~~~
bitwize
> the X server will still need to be updated since it also works as XWayland.

No, it will not. Xwayland will likely be deprecated and removed in the coming
years. The rationale being that nobody uses any Athena or Motif programs
anymore and all of the toolkits that matter to modern desktops will have
Wayland backends already.

~~~
aidenn0
What about proprietary software?

~~~
bitwize
Proprietary devs will be expected to upgrade to, for example, a new version of
Qt that supports Wayland as a back end.

Xwayland may kick around for really old apps but it will not be maintained at
all and you will be expected to forward-port your software to Wayland.

~~~
jml7c5
I think parent is asking about proprietary software that uses X11 which is no
longer maintained or updated.

~~~
bitwize
They can use the last release of Xwayland, whatever and whenever that is.

But more likely, they will need to be run on some ancient OS or distro version
and thus containerized or virtualized anyway.

------
city41
i3 is one of my favorite pieces of software. I’m currently writing a clone of
it for ChromeOS (as best as the Chrome API will allow anyway).

I think it’s a shame you can’t get something like i3 on OSX or Windows. It’s a
primary reason I stick to Linux.

~~~
newhouseb
> I’m currently writing a clone of it for ChromeOS

This is neat! Are you writing this as some sort of Chrome Extension or forking
Ash?

~~~
city41
Currently it's just a Chrome extension. The Chrome windows API is pretty
decent. I think this "window manager" will have plenty of limitations, but I
also think it might just be good enough. In parallel I'm also poking at ash a
little bit, but I doubt I'd be able to take on such a large project and
actually succeed.

This extension is a window manager that mimics Amethyst for OSX:
[https://github.com/brockgr/chrometile](https://github.com/brockgr/chrometile)

It can give an idea of what's possible with the chrome.windows API.

------
manjana
I've used i3wm and quite liked it. Simple, efficient and easy to setup. I'd
properly propose i3 for anyone wanting to taste what a tiling window manager
is like. I don't think it's competitors are nearly as easily configurable but
I only have experience with i3wm so I cannot say for sure.

~~~
Izkata
I've tried i3 a few times, and find it way overcomplicated in daily use
compared to wmii.

------
phjesusthatguy3
I've been using Awesome on Debian Stable for years. I haven't configured it
very much, and I mostly use it to keep everything full screen all the time.
I'm sure at some point the X Window System will be completely abandoned and
I'll have to move on to something else, but I haven't figured out what that
something else is, just yet.

~~~
cycloptic
There is a port to Wayland being worked on. Note that it's not usable yet.
[https://github.com/way-cooler/way-cooler](https://github.com/way-cooler/way-
cooler)

~~~
phjesusthatguy3
Thank you, I'll be following that project.

------
arethuza
I think I went:

twm -> olwm -> mwm

I then stopped faffing about with such things (after spending huge amounts of
time getting configuration _just so_ ) and over the years started increasingly
just to go with defaults for most things.

------
papermachete
XFCE has reportedly fixed screen tearing as of v4.14. Manjaro XFCE idle RAM
usage is now <800MB, no microstuttering or input lag.

~~~
shantly
> <800MB

What's getting it even close to that high? Even allowing for more features and
some serious bloat I'd expect modern Linux with XFCE to fit inside 250MB, not
counting file cache and such.

~~~
papermachete
That's counting whatever Manjaro decided to put in my ramdisk.

------
swiley
FVWM has a graphical configuration program. Also it has a window switching
widget you can put in the tiny window with the pager and stuff.

I use cwm now though because it just gets out of the way and does it’s job.

~~~
enriquto
do you use cwm on linux or openbsd? If linux, where do you get it from?

~~~
swiley
I used to just compile it but the most recent version of alpine includes
binaries in the repo.

It has very few dependancies, it’s definitely one of the easier packages to
build yourself.

------
airencracken
I used gnome2 for a while, then eventually moved to awesomewm when gnome-shell
was announced, but I've settled on dwm as my wm of choice. It does what I want
and nothing else.

------
hackbinary
My favourite X Window website has always been Kenton Lee's:
[http://www.rahul.net/kenton/index.shtml](http://www.rahul.net/kenton/index.shtml)

(from the '90's anyway.)

------
msla
I have a basic environment I take with me across distros and across time:
Window Maker, xterm, zsh, and Emacs. I have configuration files for all of
them, and the combination makes me fairly insensitive to distro as long as it
has a reasonable package repository and dependency-tracking package
management.

------
joveian
To pharaphase Tuomo Valkonen (creator of the tiling window manager ion), most
of these should not be called window managers since they make you manage the
windows.

I use ratpoison and GNU screen.

These wikipedia lists can be quite helpful, even if they are often out of date
and incomplete.

------
nycthbris
I love the variety of styles and customizability. It’s really impressive to
see some of the designs people have over at reddit.com/r/unixporn . I want to
jump in but then realize how much of a time sink it can be.

------
__s
I prefer [https://github.com/serprex/nobox](https://github.com/serprex/nobox)
(which isn't on wiki's list)

Only using 3 pages of RAM is pretty good

------
ausjke
lxde worked well for me and memory footprint is totally good.

still the GUI for embedded linux device is lacking, Android unifies that but
it's more for phones loaded with a huge chunk of bloat-ware for other non-
phone use cases.

I have been looking for embedded-linux-GUI for a long while, but I'm happy
with gnome/lxde on Desktops.

------
shmerl
Wayland compositors is a more interesting topic.

So far quite a lot of work remains to bring them up to date.

------
Chmouel
So no new windows manager after 2013?

------
chimichangga
Windowmaker.

~~~
zeotroph
I was a long time Window Maker (not Windowmaker, the world's leading software
for... something else) user for a long time as well, but finally jumped ship
to boring old KDE.

It finally acquired most of the essential window management features of
WMaker, such as Meta-R/L-Mouse to move or resize the window by clicking
anywhere into it or shading windows.

However I still miss selecting multiple windows with a rubber band and then
moving them to a different virtual desktop together, or the dock apps. I still
can't find a proper widget which displays the network activity or something
like wmforkplop to show the general system load.

~~~
fullstop
I sort of wish that kwin supported dockapps.

