aewm: An Exiguous Window Manager
aewm is a minimal window manager for X11. It has few features, but is light on resources and extremely simple in appearance. It aims to be a sane, readable, hackable implementation of the important parts of the ICCCM and EWMH (but not all of them). Some separate clients are included to handle running programs, switching between windows, and other things that you can use to build a windowing environment.
The last development release was 1.3.12 (source .tar.bz2, 36k), on 2007-12-27, and the last stable release was 1.2.7 (source .tar.gz, 41k), on 2006-02-11. You can read the latest README and NEWS online.
aewm was based on 9wm, which has also inspired lwm, larswm, and w9wm. It has in turn inspired (at least) the following window managers (this list is very out of date):
- Sapphire
- alloywm
- evilwm
- maewm (defunct?)
- Oroborus
- phluid
- swm
- Clementine
- WindowLab
- YeahWM
- Spook (defunct?)
- wimpwm
Other small WMs worth checking out include:
Some additional clients you might want to use with aewm are xbindkeys, fbpanel, and Devil’s Pie. My other page, Themes for Athena, might be helpful for setting up some of the included Xaw programs.
aewm is not meant to be make pretty screenshots, impress your friends, etc, nor does it promise increased productivity if you spend time learning it (there isn’t, actually, much of anything to learn). It's a beautiful day outside, and you can hack better if you take some time to clear your mind.