pwm (window manager)
More info
- Creator
- Tuomo Valkonen
- Type
- Window manager
- Successor
- Ion
The window manager that invented tabbed frames: several programs in one window frame with a row of tabs on top, long before browsers made the idea universal.
Tuomo Valkonen released pwm in the late 1990s as a small, fast stacking window manager with one novelty: a frame could hold several client windows, and a tab strip in the title bar switched between them. Dragging a window into another frame gave it a tab there, and the frame itself moved and resized as a unit. For anyone working with four terminals and a manual on a 1024×768 screen, it was a way to keep everything at hand without piling things up.
A year later Valkonen combined the tabs with a static tiled layout and called the result Ion; pwm lived on as the version for people who did not want tiling, and in Ion3 it finally became just a configuration. The idea spread: Fluxbox gained tabs in 2001, i3 has a tabbed layout, and browsers took the same approach to their own documents. The program is forgotten, the form is everywhere.