The Best 22 Ratpoison Alternatives

  • Openbox

    Openbox is a highly configurable, next generation window manager with extensive standards support. The *box visual style is well known for its minimalistic appearance.

    Free Open Source Linux BSD

  • i3

    i3 is a dynamic tiling window manager with clean, readable and documented code, featuring extended Xinerama support, usage of libxcb instead of xlib and several improvements over wmii.

    Free Open Source Linux BSD

  • Fluxbox

    Fluxbox is a window manager for X that was based on the Blackbox 0.61.1 code. It is very light on resources and easy to handle but yet full of features to make an easy, and extremely fast, desktop experience.

    Free Open Source Linux BSD C++

  • awesome

    awesome is a highly configurable, next generation framework window manager for X. It is very fast, extensible and licensed under the GNU GPLv2 license.

    Free Open Source Linux BSD

  • Lumina Desktop Environment

    Lumina is a lightweight, BSD licensed, standards-compliant desktop environment based upon Qt and Fluxbox. It is being developed on PC-BSD, and is being packaged for distribution on the PC-BSD package repository as well

    Free Open Source Linux BSD PC-BSD

  • Xmonad

    xmonad is a dynamically tiling X11 window manager that is written and configured in Haskell. In a normal WM, you spend half your time aligning and searching for windows. xmonad makes work easier, by automating this.

    Free Open Source Mac OS X Linux

  • dwm

    dwm is a dynamic window manager for X. It manages windows in tiled, monocle and floating layouts. All of the layouts can be applied dynamically, optimising the environment for the application in use and the task performed.

    Free Open Source Linux BSD

  • Amethyst

    Amethyst is a tiling window manager for Mac similar to the xmonad tiling window manager popular on Linux.

    Free Open Source Mac OS X

  • Bluetile

    Bluetile is a tiling window manager for Linux, designed to integrate with the GNOME desktop environment. It provides both a traditional, stacking layout mode as well as...

    Free Open Source Linux

  • wmii

    wmii is a small, dynamic window manager for X11. It is scriptable, has a 9p filesystem interface and supports classic and tiling (acme-like) window management. It aims...

    Free Open Source Linux

  • 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....

    Free Open Source Mac OS X Windows Linux BSD

  • IceWM

    IceWM is a window manager for the X Window System (freedesktop, XFree86). The goal of IceWM is speed, simplicity, and not getting in the user's way.

    Free Open Source Linux

  • Phoenix

    Phoenix is a lightweight OS X window and app manager scriptable with JavaScript. You can also easily use languages which compile to JavaScript such as CoffeeScript....

    Free Open Source Mac OS X GitHub

  • pekwm

    pekwm is a window manager that once up on a time was based on the aewm++ window manager, but it has evolved enough that it no longer resembles aewm++ at all. It has a...

    Free Open Source Linux

  • Sawfish

    Sawfish is an extensible window manager using a Lisp-based scripting language. Its policy is very minimal compared to most window managers. Its aim is simply to manage...

    Free Open Source Linux

  • Sway

    Sway is a drop-in replacement for the i3 window manager, but for Wayland instead of X11.

    Free Open Source Linux

  • herbstluftwm

    herbstluftwm is a manual tiling window manager for X11 using Xlib and Glib.

    Free Open Source Linux BSD

  • bspwm

    A tiling window manager based on binary space partitioning.

    Free Open Source Linux

  • WMFS²

    WMFS² is a lightweight and highly configurable tiling window manager for X written in C. WMFS² is a free software distributed under the BSD license. It can be...

    Free Open Source Linux