Bowman

Bowman was written by Bo Yang as a modified fvwm 1.x: the same configuration file and modules, but title bars with NeXT's buttons, icons in square tiles instead of fvwm's little pictures, and a set of decorations that let a Linux box with 8 MB of RAM pass for a NeXTstation from across the room. This was the fvwm era: everyone wanted something other than twm, and the cheapest way to get it was to fork fvwm and swap the pixmaps.

The project attracted more contributors than its author had bargained for, and when Frank Fejes and others took over later that year it was renamed AfterStep, partly to signal that it was no longer just "fvwm with a NeXT look". Wharf, the dock that became AfterStep's signature, arrived shortly after the rename. Bowman itself vanished from the distributions within a year, but its descendants remain: AfterStep lives on, and Window Maker, started in 1997 to do the same thing more properly, became GNUstep's official window manager.