Natwm Alternatives

Similar projects and alternatives to natwm

bspwm

92 7,500 1.5 C natwm VS bspwm

A tiling window manager based on binary space partitioning
river

82 2,930 9.4 Zig natwm VS river

[mirror] A dynamic tiling Wayland compositor (by riverwm)
WorkOS

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dwl

46 1,950 8.9 C natwm VS dwl

Discontinued dwm for Wayland - ARCHIVE: development has moved to Codeberg
herbstluftwm

32 1,073 4.0 C++ natwm VS herbstluftwm

A manual tiling window manager for X11
spectrwm

26 1,297 7.9 C natwm VS spectrwm

A small dynamic tiling window manager for X11.
tinywm

26 1,437 0.0 C natwm VS tinywm

The tiniest window manager.
sowm

20 893 0.0 C natwm VS sowm

Discontinued An itsy bitsy floating window manager (220~ sloc!).
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hello-wayland

4 133 5.0 C natwm VS hello-wayland

A hello world Wayland client (mirror)
2bwm

6 781 5.8 C natwm VS 2bwm

A fast floating WM written over the XCB library and derived from mcwm.
mir

5 576 9.9 C++ natwm VS mir

The Mir compositor (by canonical)
berry

4 998 0.0 C natwm VS berry

:strawberry: A healthy, byte-sized window manager (by JLErvin)
swm

1 113 1.8 C natwm VS swm

simple window manager (by dcat)

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a better natwm alternative or higher similarity.

Suggest an alternative to natwm

natwm reviews and mentions

Posts with mentions or reviews of natwm. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2021-11-03.

How X Window Managers Work, and How to Write One
14 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 3 Nov 2021

This is a great article and I remember reading it numerous times while I was implementing my own window manager.
For someone interested in working on a really fun and rewarding hobby project a WM is a great one to look into since there are so many resources starting from really small implementations:
- https://github.com/mackstann/tinywm
- https://github.com/venam/2bwm
- https://github.com/dylanaraps/sowm
- https://github.com/dcat/swm
- https://github.com/JLErvin/berry
Which are great at introducing the concepts and allowing you to grok the required libraries.
There are also a bunch of more full featured window managers which will introduce you to more advanced topics:
- https://github.com/baskerville/bspwm
- https://github.com/herbstluftwm/herbstluftwm
- https://www.nongnu.org/ratpoison/
- https://github.com/conformal/spectrwm
Gradually as you get more familiar with the ecosystem a few questions will come up:
Should I use X11 or XCB? - I personally used XCB and didn't find it too difficult to interface with, and there are a large number of implementations which use it (2bwm, bspwm, ratpoison, etc) so you shouldn't have an issue with learning more about it. But the documentation is pretty limited. If you are just wanting to write a toy WM than X11 is perfectly fine.
X or Wayland? - If you're wanting to write your first WM as a hobby project than I would recommend X over wayland just due to the much larger amount of reference material and documentation. You will have a much easier time getting your feet wet. Ignore the comments about X dying as it doesn't really matter for a hobby project, since the whole point is to have fun.
Feel free to check out my window manager which is an example of what just reading this blog post and getting inspired can result in: https://github.com/cfrank/natwm