In X11, the window frames (title bar, close button, also called "decorations") are provided by a separate program, called the window manager.
Most window managers provide additional functionality, like pop up menus in the root window, docks or launch buttons
and some of them allow you to customize their appearance with themes. Visit their home pages to get a glimpse of how they look and study how the configuration files work.
The following is a list of window managers that have been ported by Fink.
Contents
Windowmaker
Enlightenment
Icewm
Afterstep
Blackbox
TWM
Sawfish
Fvwm
Ion
Pwm
Ratpoison
Xfce
metacity
oroborus
oroborus2
fluxbox
Themes for window managers
Windowmaker
Window Maker is an X11 window manager originally designed to provide integration support for the GNUstep Desktop Environment. In every way possible, it reproduces the elegant look and feel of the NEXTSTEP[tm] user interface. It is fast, feature rich, easy to configure, and easy to use. It is also free software, with contributions being made by programmers from around the world.
Window Maker includes compatibility options which allow it to work with other popular desktop environments, namely GNOME and KDE, and comes with a powerful GUI configuration editor, called WPrefs, which removes the need to edit text-based config files by hand.
Click here for screenshot
Web site
User Guide
Fink Package windowmaker:
Maintainer -- Max Horn
Enlightenment
Enlightenment is a completely themeable, highly configurable Window Manager for the X Window System, traditionally used in Unix environments.
Its design goal is to be as configurable as possible - in look AND in feel. Enlightenment's current design aim is to become a desktop shell. That means it will manage your application windows, being able to launch applications, and also manage your files.
Click here for screenshot
Web site
FAQ
Documentation
Fink Package enlightenment:
Maintainer -- N/A
Icewm
It it has been coded from scratch in C++ for performance and size and attempts to achieve the following goals:
Feel good and fast to use, be simple and don't get in the way.
Default configuration should be fully usable without tweaking.
Mouse is optional.
Combine the best features of other wmanagers and GUIs.
Themes can customize the look, user can customize the feel.
Click here for screenshot
Web site
FAQ
Fink Package icewm:
Maintainer -- Jeffrey Whitaker
Afterstep
Originally based on the look and feel of the NeXTStep interface, it has evolved into its own creature, with interest expressed by GNUstep, to make AfterStep the window manager of choice for X11.
Click here for screenshot
Web site
FAQ
Overview
Fink Package afterstep:
Maintainer -- Finlay Dobbie
Blackbox
Blackbox is that fast, light window manager you have been looking for without all those annoying library dependancies. It's designed to be fairly small and minimal, making it particularly suited to less powerful computers.
Click here for screenshot
Web site
bbtools
Fink Package blackbox:
Maintainer -- Finlay Dobbie
TWM
Twm (Tab Window Manager, or sometimes Tom's Window Manager, after the principle author Tom LaStrange) provides titlebars, shaped windows, several forms of icon management, user-defined macro functions, click-to-type and pointer-driven keyboard focus, and user-specified key and pointer button bindings.
It has however been left behind by more recent window managers, making it something of mainly historical interest. It was for some time the only real choice of window manager, after taking over from the very simplistic uwm.
Nearly every window manager since has borrowed heavily from it, either directly, or indirectly through other window managers, such as fvwm. The source code is no longer maintained, but old TWM archives for various releases of X are available.
Click here for screenshot
Archive
Fink Package twm:
Maintainer -- Dave Morrison
Sawfish
Sawfish is an extensible window manager using a Lisp-based scripting language --all window decorations are configurable and all user-interface policy is controlled through the extension language. This is no layer on top of twm, but a wholly new architecture.
User-configuration is possible either by writing Lisp code in a personal .sawfishrc file, or through the integrated customization system.
Click here for screenshot (N/A)
Web site
FAQ
Manual
Fink Package sawfish:
Maintainer -- Max Horn
Fvwm
Fvwm, developed by Robert Nation, was once dominant in the window manager stakes, especially in the Linux community. It borrows heavily from Tom LaStrange's famous twm window manager, which was the first ICCCM-compliant window manager to be written.
Fvwm was designed to minimize memory consumption, provide a 3-D look (similar to from Motif's mwm) and provide a simple virtual desktop. Functionality can be enhanced by the use of various modules.
Click here for screenshot (N/A)
Web site
FAQ
Archive
manpages
Fink Package fvwm:
Maintainer -- Dave Morrison
Ion
Ion is a minimalist window manager. It doesn't rely on things like icons, title bars, window buttons, launch pads, and the like. It follows the premise that the window manager should be managing the windows, not the user. Window management is what it does best and it makes good use of desktop real estate without having to deal with issues like icons or taskbars. Ion is an unusual kind of X11 window manager that brings a text-editorish, keyboard friendly user interface to window management.
Ion was written as an experiment on a different kind of window management model and it tries to address the navigation problem by having the screen divided into frames that take up the whole screen and never overlap. Big displays have so much space that this should be convenient and smaller displays couldn't show more than one window at a time anyway.
Start up Ion, you get a single frame. Press F2 and it starts up a terminal. Press F3 and it prompts you for an application you want to start. You could type mozilla, for example, and start up the browser. Adding applications to a group it's done automatically, so now you have two applications open in the same frame, with tabs you can click on to switch between the two or you could also use the keystroke combination Alt-K-N to switch between them.
Now, just go to Mozilla and press Alt-F9. This will open a new workspace (a new frame in a new work area) and move Mozilla to that new location. In this case, it will be workspace 2. Then go to the terminal and press Alt-F9 again, and it will create workspace 3 and put it there. Now you can switch between these two workspaces with Alt-2 and Alt-3.
The frame layout is, of course, dynamic and different on each workspace. Given the tree instead of coordinate-based frame layout, moving between the frames can be conveniently done from the keyboard. As in PWM, the frames may have multiple clients attached.
Ion also lets you do things like split frames vertically or horizontally, start new applications within the new frames, and resize frames. After you worked for some time with ion and learned how to use it to your advantage, it's hard to go back to use another window manager.
Click here for screenshot
Web site
FAQ
Mailing Lists
Fink Package ion:
Maintainer -- Dave Morrison
Pwm
PWM is a rather lightweight window manager for X11. It has the unique feature that multiple client windows can be attached to the same frame. This feature helps keeping windows, especially the numerous xterms, organized.
PWM does have workspaces, menus and Window Maker dockapp support. It has pretty good keyboard support and almost all the functionality is configurable.
Click here for screenshot
Web site
FAQ
Fink Package pwm:
Maintainer -- Dave Morrison
Ratpoison
Ratpoison is a simple window manager with no large library dependencies, fancy graphics, or window decorations. All interaction with the window manager is done through keystrokes.
Ratpoison has a prefix map to minimize the key clobbering, and all windows are maximized and kept maximized to avoid wasting screen space. Ratpoison is a simple Window Manager with no fat library dependencies, no fancy graphics, no window decorations, and no rodent dependence. It is largely modelled after GNU Screen which has done wonders in virtual terminal market.
All windows are maximized and kept maximized to take full advantage of your precious screen real estate.
All interaction with the window manager is done through keystrokes. ratpoison has a prefix map to minimize the key clobbering that cripples Emacs and other quality pieces of software.
Click here for screenshot (N/A)
Web site
Lists
Fink Package ratpoison:
Maintainer -- Dave Morrison
Xfce
XFce is a lightweight desktop environment for UNIX platforms. It is similar to the commercial CDE, and is now based on the GTK+ toolkit.
A strong point of XFce is its ease of configuration - it is driven entirely by the mouse. The latest version features drag and drop, session management, translations for numerous languages, including support for multi-byte character sets, and numerous other features.
From version to version, XFce became more and more user friendly and easily configurable. As XFce is made for the user, it has to be very simple to configure. The desktop environment includes a window manager, called XFwm, the main panel, a file manager, a backdrop manager, a sound manager, a calendar, a pager module, and a GNOME compliance module.
Click here for screenshot
Web site
Help
Fink Package xfce:
Maintainer -- Dave Morrison
metacity
Click here for screenshot (N/A)
Fink Package metacity:
Maintainer -- Dave Morrison
oroborus
Oroborus is a small, themeable window manager for X which provides all the necessary window management functions as well as a themeable desktop, full keyboard controls and virtual desktops.
Oroborus doesn't provide any kind of dock, toolbar, program launcher, background changer or root menu as these are added weight and their functions can be provided by seperate applications.
Click here for screenshot (N/A)
Web site
Mailing Lists
Fink Package oroborus:
Maintainer -- Dave Morrison
oroborus2
Oroborus Light-weight window manager, is a small but fully featured window manager that is GNOME compliant.
Click here for screenshot (N/A)
Fink Package oroborus2:
Maintainer -- Dave Morrison
fluxbox
Fluxbox is yet another windowmanager for X. It's based on the Blackbox 0.61.1 code. Fluxbox looks like blackbox and handles styles, colors, window placement and similar thing exactly like blackbox (100% theme/style compability).
Click here for screenshot
Web site
FAQ
Themes
Fink Package fluxbox:
Maintainer -- Dave Morrison
Themes for window managers
Themes at freshmeat.net
Contents
Windowmaker
Enlightenment
Icewm
Afterstep
Blackbox
TWM
Sawfish
Fvwm
Ion
Pwm
Ratpoison
Xfce
metacity
oroborus
oroborus2
fluxbox
Themes for window managers
Windowmaker
Window Maker is an X11 window manager originally designed to provide integration support for the GNUstep Desktop Environment. In every way possible, it reproduces the elegant look and feel of the NEXTSTEP[tm] user interface. It is fast, feature rich, easy to configure, and easy to use. It is also free software, with contributions being made by programmers from around the world.
Window Maker includes compatibility options which allow it to work with other popular desktop environments, namely GNOME and KDE, and comes with a powerful GUI configuration editor, called WPrefs, which removes the need to edit text-based config files by hand.
Click here for screenshot
Web site
User Guide
Fink Package windowmaker:
Maintainer -- Max Horn
Enlightenment
Enlightenment is a completely themeable, highly configurable Window Manager for the X Window System, traditionally used in Unix environments.
Its design goal is to be as configurable as possible - in look AND in feel. Enlightenment's current design aim is to become a desktop shell. That means it will manage your application windows, being able to launch applications, and also manage your files.
Click here for screenshot
Web site
FAQ
Documentation
Fink Package enlightenment:
Maintainer -- N/A
Icewm
It it has been coded from scratch in C++ for performance and size and attempts to achieve the following goals:
Feel good and fast to use, be simple and don't get in the way.
Default configuration should be fully usable without tweaking.
Mouse is optional.
Combine the best features of other wmanagers and GUIs.
Themes can customize the look, user can customize the feel.
Click here for screenshot
Web site
FAQ
Fink Package icewm:
Maintainer -- Jeffrey Whitaker
Afterstep
Originally based on the look and feel of the NeXTStep interface, it has evolved into its own creature, with interest expressed by GNUstep, to make AfterStep the window manager of choice for X11.
Click here for screenshot
Web site
FAQ
Overview
Fink Package afterstep:
Maintainer -- Finlay Dobbie
Blackbox
Blackbox is that fast, light window manager you have been looking for without all those annoying library dependancies. It's designed to be fairly small and minimal, making it particularly suited to less powerful computers.
Click here for screenshot
Web site
bbtools
Fink Package blackbox:
Maintainer -- Finlay Dobbie
TWM
Twm (Tab Window Manager, or sometimes Tom's Window Manager, after the principle author Tom LaStrange) provides titlebars, shaped windows, several forms of icon management, user-defined macro functions, click-to-type and pointer-driven keyboard focus, and user-specified key and pointer button bindings.
It has however been left behind by more recent window managers, making it something of mainly historical interest. It was for some time the only real choice of window manager, after taking over from the very simplistic uwm.
Nearly every window manager since has borrowed heavily from it, either directly, or indirectly through other window managers, such as fvwm. The source code is no longer maintained, but old TWM archives for various releases of X are available.
Click here for screenshot
Archive
Fink Package twm:
Maintainer -- Dave Morrison
Sawfish
Sawfish is an extensible window manager using a Lisp-based scripting language --all window decorations are configurable and all user-interface policy is controlled through the extension language. This is no layer on top of twm, but a wholly new architecture.
User-configuration is possible either by writing Lisp code in a personal .sawfishrc file, or through the integrated customization system.
Click here for screenshot (N/A)
Web site
FAQ
Manual
Fink Package sawfish:
Maintainer -- Max Horn
Fvwm
Fvwm, developed by Robert Nation, was once dominant in the window manager stakes, especially in the Linux community. It borrows heavily from Tom LaStrange's famous twm window manager, which was the first ICCCM-compliant window manager to be written.
Fvwm was designed to minimize memory consumption, provide a 3-D look (similar to from Motif's mwm) and provide a simple virtual desktop. Functionality can be enhanced by the use of various modules.
Click here for screenshot (N/A)
Web site
FAQ
Archive
manpages
Fink Package fvwm:
Maintainer -- Dave Morrison
Ion
Ion is a minimalist window manager. It doesn't rely on things like icons, title bars, window buttons, launch pads, and the like. It follows the premise that the window manager should be managing the windows, not the user. Window management is what it does best and it makes good use of desktop real estate without having to deal with issues like icons or taskbars. Ion is an unusual kind of X11 window manager that brings a text-editorish, keyboard friendly user interface to window management.
Ion was written as an experiment on a different kind of window management model and it tries to address the navigation problem by having the screen divided into frames that take up the whole screen and never overlap. Big displays have so much space that this should be convenient and smaller displays couldn't show more than one window at a time anyway.
Start up Ion, you get a single frame. Press F2 and it starts up a terminal. Press F3 and it prompts you for an application you want to start. You could type mozilla, for example, and start up the browser. Adding applications to a group it's done automatically, so now you have two applications open in the same frame, with tabs you can click on to switch between the two or you could also use the keystroke combination Alt-K-N to switch between them.
Now, just go to Mozilla and press Alt-F9. This will open a new workspace (a new frame in a new work area) and move Mozilla to that new location. In this case, it will be workspace 2. Then go to the terminal and press Alt-F9 again, and it will create workspace 3 and put it there. Now you can switch between these two workspaces with Alt-2 and Alt-3.
The frame layout is, of course, dynamic and different on each workspace. Given the tree instead of coordinate-based frame layout, moving between the frames can be conveniently done from the keyboard. As in PWM, the frames may have multiple clients attached.
Ion also lets you do things like split frames vertically or horizontally, start new applications within the new frames, and resize frames. After you worked for some time with ion and learned how to use it to your advantage, it's hard to go back to use another window manager.
Click here for screenshot
Web site
FAQ
Mailing Lists
Fink Package ion:
Maintainer -- Dave Morrison
Pwm
PWM is a rather lightweight window manager for X11. It has the unique feature that multiple client windows can be attached to the same frame. This feature helps keeping windows, especially the numerous xterms, organized.
PWM does have workspaces, menus and Window Maker dockapp support. It has pretty good keyboard support and almost all the functionality is configurable.
Click here for screenshot
Web site
FAQ
Fink Package pwm:
Maintainer -- Dave Morrison
Ratpoison
Ratpoison is a simple window manager with no large library dependencies, fancy graphics, or window decorations. All interaction with the window manager is done through keystrokes.
Ratpoison has a prefix map to minimize the key clobbering, and all windows are maximized and kept maximized to avoid wasting screen space. Ratpoison is a simple Window Manager with no fat library dependencies, no fancy graphics, no window decorations, and no rodent dependence. It is largely modelled after GNU Screen which has done wonders in virtual terminal market.
All windows are maximized and kept maximized to take full advantage of your precious screen real estate.
All interaction with the window manager is done through keystrokes. ratpoison has a prefix map to minimize the key clobbering that cripples Emacs and other quality pieces of software.
Click here for screenshot (N/A)
Web site
Lists
Fink Package ratpoison:
Maintainer -- Dave Morrison
Xfce
XFce is a lightweight desktop environment for UNIX platforms. It is similar to the commercial CDE, and is now based on the GTK+ toolkit.
A strong point of XFce is its ease of configuration - it is driven entirely by the mouse. The latest version features drag and drop, session management, translations for numerous languages, including support for multi-byte character sets, and numerous other features.
From version to version, XFce became more and more user friendly and easily configurable. As XFce is made for the user, it has to be very simple to configure. The desktop environment includes a window manager, called XFwm, the main panel, a file manager, a backdrop manager, a sound manager, a calendar, a pager module, and a GNOME compliance module.
Click here for screenshot
Web site
Help
Fink Package xfce:
Maintainer -- Dave Morrison
metacity
Click here for screenshot (N/A)
Fink Package metacity:
Maintainer -- Dave Morrison
oroborus
Oroborus is a small, themeable window manager for X which provides all the necessary window management functions as well as a themeable desktop, full keyboard controls and virtual desktops.
Oroborus doesn't provide any kind of dock, toolbar, program launcher, background changer or root menu as these are added weight and their functions can be provided by seperate applications.
Click here for screenshot (N/A)
Web site
Mailing Lists
Fink Package oroborus:
Maintainer -- Dave Morrison
oroborus2
Oroborus Light-weight window manager, is a small but fully featured window manager that is GNOME compliant.
Click here for screenshot (N/A)
Fink Package oroborus2:
Maintainer -- Dave Morrison
fluxbox
Fluxbox is yet another windowmanager for X. It's based on the Blackbox 0.61.1 code. Fluxbox looks like blackbox and handles styles, colors, window placement and similar thing exactly like blackbox (100% theme/style compability).
Click here for screenshot
Web site
FAQ
Themes
Fink Package fluxbox:
Maintainer -- Dave Morrison
Themes for window managers
Themes at freshmeat.net
/ Make Contact /drop me a line at: sao1@mac.com