mackstann/tinywm

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_releases no_license

Adoption not part of the score

1672 stars · 153 forks observed · 2026-08-28

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

TinyWM is a minimal X11 window manager written in roughly 50 lines of C, supporting only window moving, resizing, raising, and sloppy focus. It is primarily intended as a teaching example of window manager programming basics, with an annotated version and a Python port.

Use cases

• learn how to write an X11 window manager
• minimal window manager for a tiny Linux setup
• study annotated C code for Xlib event handling
• base to fork for building a custom window manager
• lightweight WM for embedded or low-resource systems

When to choose

• you want to learn window manager fundamentals from a tiny codebase
• you need an extremely minimal X11 WM with move/resize/raise/focus only
• you want a starting point to hack into your own WM

When to avoid

• you need tiling, workspaces, panels, or a full desktop environment
• you want an actively developed or supported window manager
• you need Wayland support

Facets

application · maturity maintenance

gui desktop-applications operating-systems developer-tools tutorials c python x11 window-manager minimalist learning-example tiny linux

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="mackstann/tinywm")