Comparison of tiling window managers

Preamble

This page has long existed (formerly in section 42) and despite being possibly only privately useful, has attracted many of the few of the website’s visitors. The only sensible conclusion from my point of view seems to be that there are too few good resources on tiling window managers.

In any case, as of now, I cannot provide as detailed an overview as I would like to or as would seem to be needed. Below, you will find a slightly cleaned-up version of the original page which as of now has to retain a bullet-point style.

Fallback non-tiling window managers

• Fluxbox
  • used previously
  • efficent to use, not too difficult to configure
• IceWM
  • can run in parallel with other window managers (no issues with focus!)

Interesting tiling Window Managers “Candidates“

• spectrwm
  • in Debian Wheezy and Buster
  • tested for some time and is pretty useable although a bit too minimal in some aspects
  • master area concept found to be a bit too simple of a solution for window management…
  • problems with applications which require a specific window size / Window size changing and interleaving tiling and stacking is problematic
  • Focus sometimes messy (really annoying!)
  • running conky requires configuration of regions (a little tricky and does not adjust automatically to changed display sizes)
  • open question: How to use wmctrl properly?
  • The automatic management is too simple – it could be improved by dividing the space less “fair” and giving some windows more and some less space
• i3
  • in Debian
  • tested for a long time and is very good
  • very fast in tiling mode
  • modes like resize mode (can even by defined in any way wanted ☺)
  • i3 does manual tiling instead of automatic tiling. Still, unlike in ratpoison there is no static layout new windows have to fit but instead the current window is split according to the last split method used. i3 supports horizontal and vertical splits as well as tabbing ⚠.
  • quite some quirks necessary to get i3bar to output something useful… but possible ☺
  • How to get to run conky as alternative to i3bar: Change configuration as follows: add own_window yes, own_window_type panel
  • a bit slow in floating mode (like when moving games’ windows)
  • windows resize whenever new ones are created – it might be interesting to also compare this with a window manager which provides a more safe/static layout
  • moving windows within the tree is not all that intuitive
• herbstluftwm
  • in Debian wheezy and upwards
  • can do a lot of things (seems to be an improved euclid-wm)
  • simple dump and restore layout
  • performance probably slower than i3 (still, it is pseudo-C++ and thus should be pretty fast)
• stumpwm
  • in Debian jessie and upwards
  • mentions Emacs very often?
  • intersting concept “frames” and “windows” (probably more static/reliable layout than i3)
  • concept might be inspired by ratpoison (one of the “classic“ tiling window managers)
• xmonad
  • in Debian including some extensions
  • Haskell ⇒ difficult to compile and run
• qtile
  • written in python
• awesome
  • in wheezy
  • known to be heavy on resources
  • no stacking mode
  • master area concept (automatic tiling)
• bspwm
  • In Debian Stretch and onwards
  • manual and automatic modes
  • Reddit says it is just less features than herbstluftwm
• echnius
  • better dwm
  • “New windows are placed in the master area in tiling mode”
  • too automatic?