i3 Alternatives

i3 is described as 'Dynamic tiling window manager with clean, readable and documented code, featuring extended Xinerama support, usage of libxcb instead of xlib and several improvements over wmii' and is a popular Window Manager in the os & utilities category. There are more than 50 alternatives to i3 for a variety of platforms, including Linux, Wayland, BSD, Windows and Mac apps. The best i3 alternative is GNOME, which is both free and Open Source. Other great apps like i3 are Hyprland, COSMIC, Sway and niri.

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Alternatives list

  1. SwayFX icon
     3 likes
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    Sway is an incredible window manager, and certainly one of the most well established wayland window managers. However, it is restricted to only include the functionality that existed in i3. This fork ditches the simple wlr_renderer, and replaces it with our fx_renderer, capable...

    Cost / License

    • Free
    • Open Source

    Application type

    Platforms

    • Linux
    • Arch Linux
    • Gentoo Linux
    • Fedora
    • Nix Package Manager
    • Sway
    • FreeBSD
    • Wayland
     
  2. Fluxbox icon
     33 likes
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    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, and extremely fast, desktop experience. It is built using C++ and licensed under the MIT license.

    73 Fluxbox alternatives

    Cost / License

    • Free
    • Open Source

    Application type

    Platforms

    • Linux
    • BSD
    • C++
     
  3. Qtile icon
     8 likes
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    A full-featured, hackable tiling window manager written and configured in Python.

    Cost / License

    • Free
    • Open Source

    Application type

    Platforms

    • Linux
     
  4. i3-gaps icon
     2 likes
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    i3-gaps is a fork of i3wm, a tiling window manager for X11. It is kept up to date with upstream, adding a few additional features such as gaps between windows.

    Cost / License

    • Free
    • Open Source

    Application type

    Alerts

    • Discontinued

    Platforms

    • Linux
     
  5. Wayfire icon
     7 likes
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    Wayfire is a 3D Wayland compositor, inspired by Compiz and based on wlroots. It aims to create a customizable, extendable and lightweight environment without sacrificing its appearance.

    Cost / License

    • Free
    • Open Source

    Platforms

    • Linux
    • FreeBSD
     
  6. herbstluftwm icon
     5 likes
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    herbstluftwm is a manual tiling window manager for X11 using Xlib and Glib.

    Cost / License

    • Free
    • Open Source

    Application type

    Platforms

    • Linux
    • BSD
     
  7. Amethyst icon
     21 likes
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    Amethyst 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 shortcuts, multi-monitor support, multiple layouts, and the option to float certain applications.

    101 Amethyst alternatives

    Cost / License

    • Free
    • Open Source

    Application type

    Platforms

    • Mac
     
  8. spectrwm icon
     11 likes
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    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.

    Cost / License

    • Free
    • Open Source

    Application type

    Platforms

    • Mac
    • Linux
    • BSD
     
  9. yabai icon
     8 likes
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    yabai started as a C99 rewrite of chunkwm, originally supposed to be its first RC version.

    110 yabai alternatives

    Cost / License

    • Free
    • Open Source

    Application type

    Platforms

    • Mac
     
  10. LeftWM icon
     3 likes
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    Left is a tiling window manager written in rust for stability and performance. The core of left is designed to do one thing and one thing well. Be a window manager. Because you probably want more than just a black screen LeftWM is built around the concept of theming.

    Cost / License

    • Free
    • Open Source

    Application type

    Platforms

    • Linux
     
  11. wmii icon
     9 likes
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    wmii is a small, dynamic window manager for X11. It is scriptable, has a 9p filesystem interface and supports classic and tiling (acme-like) window management. It aims to maintain a small and clean (read hackable and beautiful) codebase.

    Cost / License

    • Free
    • Open Source

    Application type

    Platforms

    • Linux
     
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