alloywm

Alloywm is an exquisite and aesthetic window manager for X11. Its main objective is to steer clear of being over-bloated like the popular window managers like KDE and keeping the user interface subtle. Additionally, it is designed to be small, fast, and have a small memory footprint. I adopted this window manager initially as a testbed for programming in C for X11. As someone who was mainly a non-graphical programmer for a long time, it appealed to me.

While Alloywm is not very configurable, it can still be molded to your liking by editing source code to add desired functionality. The window manager has a Macintosh GUI interface feel, but the difference is that you cannot click inside the window to give focus. However, developers have indicated that this feature will be added soon. One noteworthy feature of Alloywm is that new windows are drawn wherever you place the mouse cursor. For instance, if the mouse is in the center of the screen, and you run an rxvt, then the top-left hand corner of the window gets drawn in the center. Overall, Alloywm is one of those rare window managers that deliver on its promises of keeping things simple, fast and lightweight.