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dwm

A dynamic window manager from suckless.

dwm fits in around 2,000 lines of C and is configured by editing config.h and recompiling — there is no runtime configuration file. Users typically maintain a personal fork with their preferred patches applied. The window-manager itself is extremely minimal: it tiles windows, supports tags (a more powerful generalisation of workspaces), and exposes an empty status bar that programs can write to via xsetroot.

dwm is one of the flagship projects of suckless.org, an informal collective devoted to small, simple, hackable software. The project's website famously argues that simplicity in software is a feature in itself, and dwm is the emblematic example: under the philosophy, configuration is the source code, and any feature that is not a few-line C addition is probably not worth having.

dwm has a small but dedicated user base, and a long tradition of patches that add specific behaviours (alternative tiling layouts, gaps between windows, alpha transparency, system-tray support). Several derivatives — dusk, river-style forks — extend the same philosophy in slightly different directions.

Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install dwm
Fedora/RHEL:   sudo dnf install dwm
Arch:          sudo pacman -S dwm