Software
We've compiled a list of 23 free and paid alternatives to spectrwm. The primary competitors include Openbox, i3. In addition to these, users also draw comparisons between spectrwm and Fluxbox, dwm, Xmonad. Also you can look at other similar options here: OS and Utilities.
Openbox is a highly configurable, next generation window manager with extensive standards support.
A dynamic tiling window manager designed for X11, inspired by wmii, and written in C.
Fluxbox is a window manager for X that was based on the Blackbox 0.61.1 code.
dwm is a dynamic window manager for X. It manages windows in tiled, monocle and floating layouts.
xmonad is a dynamically tiling X11 window manager that is written and configured in Haskell.
A dynamic window manager for the X Window System developed in the C and Lua programming languages.
Ratpoison is a simple window manager with no fat library dependencies, no fancy graphics, no window...
Phoenix is a lightweight OS X window and app manager scriptable with JavaScript.
spectrwm is a small dynamic tiling window manager for X11.
spectrwm is a small dynamic tiling window manager for X11.
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Windows
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. 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.
It was largely inspired by xmonad and dwm. Both are fine products but suffer from things like: crazy-unportable-language-syndrome, silly defaults, asymmetrical window layout, "how hard can it be?" and good old NIH. Nevertheless dwm was a phenomenal resource and many good ideas and code was borrowed from it. On the other hand xmonad has great defaults, key bindings and xinerama support but is crippled by not being written in C.
Spectrwm is a beautiful pearl! For it too, was created by grinding irritation. Nothing is a bigger waste of time than moving windows around until they are the right size-ish or having just about any relevant key combination being eaten for some task one never needs. The path of agony is too long to quote and in classical OpenBSD fashion (put up, or hack up) a brand new window manager was whooped up to serve no other purpose than to obey its masters. It was written by Marco Peereboom, Ryan Thomas McBride & Darrin Chandler and it is released under the ISC license. Patches can be accepted provided they are ISC licensed as well.
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