Flwm is my attempt to combine the best ideas I have seen in several window managers. The primary influence and code base is from wm2 by Chris Cannam. Primary features are:

Occupies as little screen space as possible. The border and titles are as thin as I could possibly make them, while still allowing resizing edges. Sideways titlebars allow 100% vertical usage of screen. Snap-to-edge snaps the inside as well as outside of the borders to the screen edge. Maximum width removes the 3D resize borders off the left and right of the window, so only waste is the flat titlebar area at left. Windows with no label do not have a titlebar either, just resize edges. Programs can resize window to fullscreen and get what they want (the window filling the screen) with no unpredictable positioning and without raising the window.

Independent maximize buttons for width & height.

The "taskbar" (or iconbox), "start menu", Alt+Tab window switching, multiple desktop switching, "panel", and "start menu" are all merged into a singe pop-up menu that takes zero space when not being used. Same popup menu can be brought up by clicking on desktop, right-clicking on window border, or Alt+Tab.

space when not being used. Same popup menu can be brought up by clicking on desktop, right-clicking on window border, or Alt+Tab. Designed to be point-to-type. If a window grabs the focus the mouse moves to it so this is never inconsistent. This really works, try it!

Designed to work with smaller, overlapping windows so that programs can finally take advantage of multiple windows, rather than being forced to make a big single "mdi" window. Primarily this means windows do not click to top if you click inside them. In addition Flwm obeys any attempt by the program to resize and/or move a window.

if you click inside them. In addition Flwm obeys any attempt by the program to resize and/or move a window. Understands Motif, KDE, and Gnome window manager hints, and works with SGI programs that assumme 4DWM.

Really small and fast code.

Newest changes in version 1.02:

Fixes to the code to compile cleanly with the newest versions of fltk1 and fltk2.0.

Fltk1 version did not draw ampersands in the popup menu, and Alt+Tab did not dismiss the menu when you released the Alt key.

Here is a screenshot, showing Gnome, KDE, and plain X programs all running in flwm windows. In the middle is the popup menu (missing the size icons right now, this will be fixed), this was brought up by right-clicking on the border of the "Buddy list" window:



To compile flwm you need the fltk library. A static-linked Linux 486 executable is also provided here.

If you have customized flwm, when compiling be sure to look at the newest config.h rather than just use an old one. There are often additional symbols defined in new versions that must exist for compilation to be correct.