sminez/penrose

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

1350 stars · 91 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

Penrose is a modular Rust library for building your own X11 tiling window manager, inspired by dwm and xmonad. Rather than being an installable binary, it is used as a dependency in your own crate so you can configure and extend window management behavior in code.

Use cases

• write a custom tiling window manager in Rust
• configure my own X11 window manager without editing C code
• replace dwm or xmonad with a hackable Rust-based WM
• build a minimal tiling WM tailored to my workflow
• learn how window managers work by extending a library
• customize keybindings, layouts, and hooks programmatically

When to choose

• you want a tiling window manager configured in Rust code rather than a config file
• you like the dwm/xmonad model but want a modern, typed, extensible codebase
• you need fine-grained control over layouts, hooks, and window management behavior
• you are comfortable writing and compiling your own binary crate

When to avoid

• you want an out-of-the-box window manager with a simple config file
• you need Wayland support - penrose is X11 only
• you are not comfortable writing Rust or maintaining a compiled binary
• you want a drop-in replacement for an existing WM without coding

Facets

library · maturity active

gui developer-tools plugin-system desktop-applications developer-tools operating-systems rust x11 window-manager tiling-wm dwm-inspired xmonad-inspired xcb linux

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