spectrwm

spectrwm is a small, dynamic tiling and reparenting 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 it does not require one to learn a language to do any configuration. spectrwm is written by hackers for hackers, and it strives to be small, compact, and fast.

spectrwm was largely inspired by xmonad and dwm. Both are fine products, but they suffer from things like: crazy-unportable-language syndrome, silly defaults, asymmetrical window layout, the 'how hard can it be?' (to code efficiently) problem, and good old NIH. Nevertheless, dwm was a phenomenal resource, and good ideas and code were borrowed from it. On the other hand, xmonad has great defaults and key bindings, plus xinerama support, but it is crippled by not being written in C.

spectrwm is a beautiful pearl! For it, too, was created by grinding irritation. Nothing is a bigger waste of time either than moving windows around until they are the right size-ish or having just about any relevant key combination be eaten by some task one never performs. The path of agony is too long to quote, and, in classic OpenBSD fashion (put up, or hack up), a brand new window manager was whooped up to serve no other purpose than to obey its masters.

spectrwm is released under the ISC license. Patches can be accepted, provided that they are also licensed with ISC.

Building and installation

Click here for current installation guide

Feedback and questions

You can and come chat with us on IRC. We use the OFTC channel #spectrwm.

Major features

Dynamic RandR support (multi-head)

Navigation anywhere on all screens with either the keyboard or mouse

Customizable status bar

Human readable configuration file

Restartable without losing state

Quick launch menu

Many screen layouts possible with a few simple key strokes

Windows can be added or removed from master area

Windows can be moved to any workspace or within a region

Resizable master area

Move/resize floating windows

Drag-to-float

Extended Window Manager Hints (EWMH) Support

Configureable tiling

Adjustable tile gap allows for a true one pixel border.

Customizable colors and border width.

User definable regions

User definable modkey & key bindings

User definable quirk bindings

User definable key bindings to launch applications

Multi OS support (*BSD, Linux, OSX, Windows/cygwin)

Reparenting window manager

Documentation

Click here for current man page

License

spectrwm is ISC licensed unless otherwise specified in individual files.

Screenshots