scrotwm is a minimalistic tiling window manager that 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.
| Tags | Desktop Environment Window Manager tiling WM |
|---|---|
| Licenses | ISC |
| Operating Systems | Unix OpenBSD Linux |
| Implementation | C |
| Translations | Spanish Italian Russian Portuguese |
Recent releases


Release Notes: This release adds M-f to make switching between windows in the same workspace easier. Moving and resizing floating windows with the mouse is now based on click location. UTF-8 support has been added. The flip layout command M-S-\ has been added. Uniconify works on windows with non-ASCII titles. Memory and file descriptor leaks in conf_load are plugged. The missing ws_prior key binding has been added to the keyboard mapping files. The response to applications when windows are not reconfigured as requested has been fixed. There are many fixes to the bar display.


Release Notes: A crash when mvws_n is used in an empty workspace was fixed. Iconified windows are now skipped correctly. Status bar refresh was improved. Various man page fixes and improvements were incorporated. Windows can now be searched in the current workspace, and workspaces can be named and searched. Workspaces (empty or not) can be cycled with M-<Up> and M-<Down>. Status bar text can now be be left-, center-, or right-justified. Time is now also localized. stack_enable was fixed. A new keyboard_mapping option loads pre-defined key bindings for different keyboard layouts. Floating windows can now be moved and resized with the keyboard.


Release Notes: Urgent handling was added and is displayed in the bar. A fake middle mouse button was added for easy pasting and for use on systems with only one mouse button.


Release Notes: A knob was added per worksapce to allow floating windows to be obscured. Initial stack mode was added per worksapce in the configuration file for start-of-day. Arguments were added to autorun applications. The EWMH support was documented.


Release Notes: A crash when apps don't set _NET_WM_PID was fixed and scrotwm can work around this lack to find out the PID anyway. This is a critical fix and users should upgrade as soon as possible.
Recent comments
23 Jun 2009 14:14
Instructions for compiling scrotwm 0.9.5 on Gentoo Linux:
This procedure will probably work on most other Linuxes as well.
11 Jun 2009 03:24
There are several linux ports out there. I have seen Ubuntu, SLES, Arch, Debian and some others.
06 Jun 2009 16:15
this looks great but i can't get it to build on linux. please fix!
19 Feb 2009 01:45
Just a curious question
Is the project name supposed to be pronouced as
"scrotum"? :P
05 Feb 2009 09:52
Re: cwm?
> what does this have that cwm doesn't?
the biggest feature: tiling. it's more similar to
dwm (but it has a config file, remembers state
between restarts and a few other things) and xmonad
(but being in C doesn't involve having a working
Haskell environment to build/reconfigure, quite a
challenge on some machine/CPU types).