PaperWM Alternatives

Apps similar to PaperWM include Hyprland, which is free and open source. Other options are niri, Sway, i3 and Openbox. You're spoiled for choice with Window Managers like PaperWM: we list more than 50 alternatives for Linux, Mac and Windows.

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Alternatives
PaperWM alternatives page was last updated

Alternatives list

  1. wmii icon
     9 likes

    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
    Good alternative?
     
  2. Labwc icon
     2 likes

    Labwc stands for Lab Wayland Compositor, where lab can mean any of the following:

    Cost / License

    Application type

    Platforms

    • Linux
    Good alternative?
     
  3. JWM icon
     5 likes

    JWM is a light-weight window manager for the X11 Window System. JWM is written in C and uses only Xlib at a minimum. Because of its small footprint, JWM makes a good window manager for older computers and less powerful systems, such as the .

    Cost / License

    • Free
    • Open Source (MIT)

    Application type

    Platforms

    • Linux
    Good alternative?
     
  4. LeftWM icon
     3 likes

    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 (MIT)

    Application type

    Platforms

    • Linux
    Good alternative?
     
  5. herbstluftwm icon
     5 likes

    herbstluftwm is a manual tiling window manager for X11 using Xlib and Glib.

    Cost / License

    • Free
    • Open Source

    Application type

    Platforms

    • Linux
    • BSD
    Good alternative?
     
  6. Ratpoison icon
     5 likes

    Ratpoison is a simple window manager with no fat library dependencies, no fancy graphics, no window decorations, and no rodent dependence. The screen can be split into non-overlapping frames. All windows are kept maximized inside their frames to take full advantage of your...

    Cost / License

    Application type

    Platforms

    • Linux
    • X11
    Good alternative?
     
  7. doWM icon
     1 like

    doWM is a beautiful floating and tiling window manager for X11 completely written in golang.

    Cost / License

    • Free
    • Open Source (MIT)

    Application type

    Platforms

    • X11
    • Linux
    • BSD
    Good alternative?
     
  8. Polonium icon
     1 like

    An autotile manager for Plasma 6. An (unofficial) spiritual successor to Bismuth built on KWin 6. The descendant of autotile.

    Cost / License

    • Free
    • Open Source (MIT)

    Application type

    Alerts

    • Discontinued

    Platforms

    • Linux
    • KDE
    • Wayland
    Good alternative?
     
  9.  1 like

    dwl is a compact, hackable compositor for Wayland based on wlroots. It is intended to fill the same space in the Wayland world that dwm does in X11, primarily in terms of functionality, and secondarily in terms of philosophy. Like dwm, dwl is:

    Cost / License

    Application type

    Platforms

    • Linux
    • Wayland
    Good alternative?
     
  10. i3-gaps icon
     2 likes

    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
    Good alternative?
     
  11. PyTyle icon
     1 like

    PyTyle is an extremely versatile and extensible tiling manager that is meant to be used on top of EWMH window managers. Its feature set was modeled after the basic tiling features of XMonad.

    76 PyTyle alternatives

    Cost / License

    • Free
    • Open Source

    Application type

    Platforms

    • Linux
    Good alternative?
     
  12. Bluetile icon
     8 likes

    Bluetile 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 tiling layouts where windows are arranged to use the entire screen without overlapping.

    Cost / License

    • Free
    • Open Source

    Application type

    Alerts

    • Discontinued

    Platforms

    • Linux
    Good alternative?
     
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