Enhanced Motif Window Manager

EMWM is a fork of the Motif Window Manager with fixes and enhancements. The idea behind this is to provide compatibility with current xorg extensions and applications, without changing the way the window manager looks and behaves. This includes support for multi-monitor setups trough Xinerama/Xrandr, UFT-8 support with Xft fonts, and overall better compatibility with software that requires Extended Window Manager Hints.

Additionally a couple of goodies are available in the separate utilities package: XmToolbox, a toolchest like application launcher, which reads it's multi-level menu structure from a simple plain-text file ~/.toolboxrc, and XmSm, a simple session manager that provides session configuration, locking and shutdown/suspend options.

Downloads

Latest: EMWM: emwm-src.tar.xz • Utilities: emwm-utils-src.tar.xz (Updated on Feb 18, 2023).
Stable: EMWM: emwm-src-1.0a.tar.xz • Utilities: emwm-utils-src-1.0.tar.xz

See the FAQ/Guide for hints on setting up EMWM and Motif based applications in general.
Xresources configuration sample (as seen in some of the screenshots below) is also available here.

Note on MWM compatibility: Initially EMWM used same configuration files and X resources as MWM, this needed to change in order to avoid conflicts. Future releases will only recognize Emwm class in X resources, mwmrc becomes emwmrc also.

Latest Changes (since Sep 4, 2021):

• Revamped build process (no makefile tweaking necessary any longer). OpenBSD and Tribblix support.
• Improved Xrandr support.
• Removed the hard-coded 'toggle standard behavior' key binding.
• Added titleLeft resource that controls window title alignment (analogous to 4Dwm's SG_titleLeft).
• Added xineramaFollowPointer X resource, which controls how active Xinerama screen (the one new windows are placed on) is deduced.
• Basic _NET_WM_WINDOW_TYPE support. Added utilityWindowDecoration and utilityWindowFunctions X resources for _NET_WM_WINDOW_TYPE_UTILITY/TOOLBAR windows. _NET_WM_WINDOW_TYPE_DIALOG uses transient window decoration and functions.

Complete history: emwm-changes.txt

Git repository and release archive are accessible through the sourceforge project page.

See the included README file for build instructions. Everything is usually tested on FreeBSD and some sort of GNU/Linux. If you have a question that isn't answered in the FAQ or Manpages, feel free to contact me (Alex): mail@fastestcode.org

Screenshots

Click for a larger picture.

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See also: XFile • XImaging • Misc. X Stuff • Homepage About