spectrwm is a minimalistic tiling window manager that 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.
| Tags | Desktop Environment Window Manager tiling WM |
|---|---|
| Licenses | ISC |
| Operating Systems | Unix OpenBSD Linux |
| Implementation | C |
| Translations | Spanish Italian Russian Portuguese |
Recent releases


Release Notes: This release adds the ability to move/resize floating windows beyond region boundaries. It adds 'soft boundary' behavior to region boundaries. When moving a window past the region boundary, the window will 'snap' to the region boundary if it is less than boundary_width distance beyond the edge. A new boundary_width configuration option has been added. The 'soft boundary' behavior can be disabled by setting this option to 0. The ability to set tile_gap to negative values has been added, which makes it possible for tiled windows to overlap. Set this to the opposite of border_width to collapse borders.


Release Notes: Changes validation of default 'optional' programs to only occur when the respective config entry is overridden, not when the binding is overridden. Adds details to the man page and spectrwm.conf on how to disable/override the default programs. New quirks: NOFOCUSONMAP (don't change focus to the window when it gets mapped on the screen) and FOCUSONMAP_SINGLE (when the window is mapped, change focus if it is the only mapped window on the workspace using the quirk entry). A few other updates and fixes.


Release Notes: This release adds quite a few little fixes (but they add up). It avoids a free on an uninitialized variable by setting optval to NULL, fixes fparseln flags to remove escape characters in the result, fixes an issue with rapid window crossing events being ignored, validates bound spawn programs after conf is loaded, fixes move/resize to bail if the window is destroyed, and fixes the bar clock not getting updated during periods of inactivity.


Release Notes: This release fixes handling of region focus with empty workspaces. It fixes toggle_bar not working on empty workspaces. It fixes an issue where multiple key actions might be handled simultaneously. It fixes focus behavior when iconified windows exist in the ws. It fixes windows not being unmapped on single-monitor full-screen layout. It fixes mouse and keyboard binds to work regardless of caps/numlock state. It fixes a couple of segfaults and a couple of memory leaks.


Release Notes: This is an emergency patch release for users who ended up with a blank screen after starting spectrwm. There's no need to update unless you see this issue. This release fixes scan_xrandr to fall back when a scan results in no new regions and adds tilde ("~") expansion to the autorun command in the configuration.
Recent comments
23 Jun 2009 14:14
Instructions for compiling scrotwm 0.9.5 on Gentoo Linux:
This procedure will probably work on most other Linuxes as well.
11 Jun 2009 03:24
There are several linux ports out there. I have seen Ubuntu, SLES, Arch, Debian and some others.
06 Jun 2009 16:15
this looks great but i can't get it to build on linux. please fix!
19 Feb 2009 01:45
Just a curious question
Is the project name supposed to be pronouced as
"scrotum"? :P
05 Feb 2009 09:52
Re: cwm?
> what does this have that cwm doesn't?
the biggest feature: tiling. it's more similar to
dwm (but it has a config file, remembers state
between restarts and a few other things) and xmonad
(but being in C doesn't involve having a working
Haskell environment to build/reconfigure, quite a
challenge on some machine/CPU types).