spectrwm Alternatives

    spectrwm is described as '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' and is an app in the OS & Utilities category. There are more than 25 alternatives to spectrwm for a variety of platforms, including Linux, BSD, Mac, Windows and PC-BSD. The best alternative is i3, which is both free and Open Source. Other great apps like spectrwm are Openbox (Free, Open Source), awesome (Free, Open Source), Xmonad (Free, Open Source) and Sway (Free, Open Source).

    This page was last updated Jun 28, 2021

    1. Fluxbox

      • Free • Open Source
      • Linux
      • BSD
      • C++
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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.
      • pekwm is a window manager that once up on a time was based on the aewm++ window manager, but it has evolved enough that it no longer resembles aewm++ at all.
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      • JWM

        • Free • Open Source
        • Linux
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        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...

      • Bluetile

        • Free • Open Source
        • Linux
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        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.

        Discontinued

        The last commit on this software is ten years ago and the GNOME desktop has moved on. Notably, it is now difficult to replace the default window manager in GNOME.

      • bspwm

        • Free • Open Source
        • Linux
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        A tiling window manager based on binary space partitioning.

      • Ratpoison

        • Free • Open Source
        • Linux
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        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.

      • wmii

        • Free • Open Source
        • Linux
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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.
      • Qtile is a full-featured, hackable tiling window manager written in Python. Qtile is simple, small, and extensible. It's easy to write your own layouts, widgets, and built-in commands.
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      • Wayfire

        • Free • Open Source
        • Linux
        • FreeBSD
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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.
        • herbstluftwm is a manual tiling window manager for X11 using Xlib and Glib.
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        Showing 20 of 33 alternatives