Cogs and Levers A blog full of technical stuff

Writing a Window Manager for X11

As a bit of a bookmark to myself, I just wanted to post about writing a window manager for X windows. A lot of the material that I’ve seen around the place in articles and posts themselves have all pointed me towards downloading the out-of-print O’Reilly Open Book site.

Some of the books of interest to a window manager programmer are

I’m sure that there is plenty of other reference material around, but a lot of people were suggesting to put a copy of these in your claw - so I have. Digging around a little bit more, I came across TinyWM. TinyWM looks like a suitable candidate to be the bootstrap to a window manager project. It’s functional, it doesn’t do much but it is around 50 lines of C code. I’ll be using this as my guide for when that rainy day comes and I start work on my own WM.