9wm is an open source stacking

window manager A window manager is system software that controls the placement and appearance of windows within a windowing system in a graphical user interface. Most window managers are designed to help provide a desktop environment. They work in conjunctio ...

for

X11 The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems. X provides the basic framework for a GUI environment: drawing and moving windows on the display device and interacting wi ...

, written by David Hogan (dhog) in 1994 to emulate the Plan 9 Second Edition window manager, 8 . Many later minimalist window managers for X were either inspired by, or directly derived from, 9wm. 9wm takes only 0.4 MB in RAM. Th
README
file in the 9wm source distribution describes it like so:

Features

9wm does not support a

menubar A menu bar is a graphical control element which contains drop-down menus. The menu bar's purpose is to supply a common housing for window- or application-specific menus which provide access to such functions as opening files, interacting wi ...

titlebar In computing, a window is a graphical control element. It consists of a visual area containing some of the graphical user interface of the program it belongs to and is framed by a window decoration. It usually has a rectangular shape that can ove ...

maximize In mathematical analysis, the maxima and minima (the respective plurals of maximum and minimum) of a function, known collectively as extrema (the plural of extremum), are the largest and smallest value of the function, either within a given r ...

, multiple desktops, desktop shortcuts,

theming Theming refers to "the use of an overarching theme...to create a holistic and integrated spatial organization of a consumer venue.” A theme is “a unifying or dominant idea or motif”, so theming is the process of designing and constructing an ...

or a

desktop wallpaper A wallpaper or background (also known as a desktop background, desktop picture or desktop image on computers) is a digital image (photo, drawing etc.) used as a decorative background of a graphical user interface on the screen of a computer, smar ...

. A right click on the root window (desktop) opens a

context menu A context menu (also called contextual, shortcut, and pop up or pop-up menu) is a menu in a graphical user interface (GUI) that appears upon user interaction, such as a right-click mouse operation. A context menu offers a limited set of choic ...

providing window operations (move, resize, delete, hide); a list of up to 32 hidden windows which may be unhidden by selecting from the menu; and a command to launch a

terminal emulator A terminal emulator, or terminal application, is a computer program that emulates a video terminal within some other display architecture. Though typically synonymous with a shell or text terminal, the term ''terminal'' covers all remote term ...

(typically 9term). Applications are launched via terminal only, and there is no additional task switching facility. 9wm uses a

click to focus In computing, focus indicates the act of selecting an element of a graphical user interface. Text entered at the keyboard or pasted from a clipboard is sent to the component which has the focus. Moving the focus away from a specific user interface ...

model and requires a

three-button mouse A mouse button is an electric switch on a computer mouse which can be pressed (“clicked”) to select or interact with an element of a graphical user interface. Mouse buttons are most commonly implemented as miniature snap-action switches ( ...

. There are no keyboard controls or XKeys support. New windows are drawn by prompting the user to "sweep out" a screen rectangle for the window, which may be considered

focus stealing In computing, focus stealing is a mode error occurring when a program not in Focus (computing), focus (e.g. minimized or operating in background) places a window in the foreground and redirects all keyboard input to that window. This is considered t ...

if an application unexpectedly requests a new window. Window borders originally did nothing but indicate focus—draggable borders for move and resize were eventually added to

rio Rio or Río is the Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and Maltese word for "river". When spoken on its own, the word often means Rio de Janeiro, a major city in Brazil. Rio or Río may also refer to: Geography Brazil * Rio de Janeiro * Rio do Sul, a ...

Plan 9 from Bell Labs Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a distributed operating system which originated from the Computing Science Research Center (CSRC) at Bell Labs in the mid-1980s and built on UNIX concepts first developed there in the late 1960s. Since 2000, Plan 9 has be ...

an
Plan 9 from User Space
9wm is written in C using the

Xlib Xlib (also known as libX11) is an X Window System protocol client library written in the C programming language. It contains functions for interacting with an X server. These functions allow programmers to write programs without knowing the ...

toolkit and has no other dependencies. An undocumented -nostalgia option enables a Blit cursor, which John Mackin insisted on.

Resizing windows

Window geometry is described by "sweeping out" a rectangle on the screen. To sweep, click and hold the right button at one corner of the desired rectangle, move the mouse to the diagonally opposite corner, and release the button. Placing new windows and resizing existing windows are done by sweep operations.

Relicensing following creator's death

During the period when 9wm was maintained by David Hogan, the license was as follows: Licence

9wm is free software, and is Copyright (c) 1994 by David Hogan. Permission is granted to all sentient beings to use this software, to make copies of it, and to distribute those copies, provided that: (1) the copyright and licence notices are left intact (2) the recipients are aware that it is free software (3) any unapproved changes in functionality are either (i) only distributed as patches or (ii) distributed as a new program which is not called 9wm and whose documentation gives credit where it is due (4) the author is not held responsible for any defects or shortcomings in the software, or damages caused by it. There is no warranty for this software. Have a nice day. After the death of David Hogan, the succeeding maintainers going by the name "The Estate of David Hogan" relicensed version 1.1 and later versions under the

MIT License The MIT License is a permissive free software license originating at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the late 1980s. As a permissive license, it puts only very limited restriction on reuse and has, therefore, high license comp ...

9wm derivatives and 9wm-inspired window managers

* larswm * aewm * wm2 and

wmx Wikimania is the Wikimedia movement's annual conference, organized by volunteers and hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. Topics of presentations and discussions include Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia, other wikis, open-source software, f ...

wmii In computing, a tiling window manager is a window manager with an organization of the screen into mutually non-overlapping frames, as opposed to the more common approach (used by stacking window managers) of coordinate-based stacking of overlap ...

dwm dwm is a minimalist dynamic window manager for the X Window System developed by Suckless that has influenced the development of several other X window managers, including xmonad and awesome. It is externally similar to wmii, but internally mu ...

i
Plan 9 from User Space
* cwm * lwm

References

External links

* {{X desktop environments and window managers Free software programmed in C Free X window managers Plan 9 from Bell Labs