PWM
The first tabbing window manager
About
PWM was the first window manager to implement "tabbed frames" or the back then unique feature allowing multiple client windows to be attached to the same frame. (Other window managers have supported a "squeezed" "tab-style" title bar before PWM, including BeOS that influenced the style of PWM, but have not provided a "tabbed document interface" in the window manager, as far as I am aware.) This feature helps keeping windows, especially the numerous xterms, organized, reducing the window clutter. A look at the screenshots below might clarify the idea.
Being a lightweight window manager with emphasis on usability, PWM discards some features common in window managers these days: only window shading in lieu of iconification is supported, there are no close and other window buttons (these actions are available conveniently through a menu), simple and elegant look instead of pixmapped themes, et cetera. PWM does have workspaces, menus and Window Maker dockapp support. It has pretty good keyboard support and almost all the functionality is configurable.
While the original PWM, or PWM1, is no longer maintained, [[Ion|intro]], versions 2 and 3, can to some degree emulate this behaviour, and indeed provide nominal PWM2 and PWM3, although the bindings are different, employing prefix keys.
Screenshots
Download
PWM1
PWM should compile on almost any *nix system with X11, a C compiler and
gmake, after some minor modifications to system.mk (there is no
./configure). For more detailed building and installation instructions,
read the README. If you have any problems, just email me.
This version of PWM has not for a long time (since circa year 2000) been actively maintained by me, but high-quality patches to found problems are still accepted. I will not consider features requests to PWM1.
PWM2 and PWM3
Please see the Ion Download page and get Ion2 or Ion3.
The packages will build pwm or pwm3 binaries configuring
Ion to work in a more PWM-like manner.
Documentation and resources
These relate to PWM1: