spectrwm icon
spectrwm icon

spectrwm

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.

spectrwm screenshot 1

Cost / License

  • Free
  • Open Source

Application type

Platforms

  • Mac
  • Linux
  • BSD
spectrwm screenshot 1
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11likes
75alternatives
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  1.  Minimalistic
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Our users have written 1 comments and reviews about spectrwm, and it has gotten 11 likes

spectrwm was added to AlternativeTo by lokeshmandvekar on and this page was last updated .

Comments and Reviews

   
psyco430404
0

Scrot is as it says on the site, minimal with out losing functionality. It maintains everything that's needed by a tiling window manager, and removes all of the extra guff. Because its written in C its extremely lightweight and responsive. As far as configuration is concerned, it uses a small config file in you home folder to control everything. Its status bar can be complimented with bash to give you common read outs and system stats. All in all if you ever want a tillable window manager for X11, please give it a try.

Review from a new or low-activity account — shown here, but not counted in the app rating.

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What is spectrwm?

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. It was written by hackers for hackers and it strives to be small, compact and fast.

It was largely inspired by xmonad and dwm. Both are fine products but suffer from things like: crazy-unportable-language-syndrome, silly defaults, asymmetrical window layout, "how hard can it be?" and good old NIH. Nevertheless dwm was a phenomenal resource and many good ideas and code was borrowed from it. On the other hand xmonad has great defaults, key bindings and xinerama support but 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 than moving windows around until they are the right size-ish or having just about any relevant key combination being eaten for some task one never needs. The path of agony is too long to quote and in classical 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. It was written by Marco Peereboom, Ryan Thomas McBride & Darrin Chandler and it is released under the ISC license. Patches can be accepted provided they are ISC licensed as well.