xfwm4
More info
- Creator
- Olivier Fourdan
- Released
- Owner
- The Xfce project
- Type
- Window manager
- License
- GPL-2.0
- Source
- gitlab.xfce.org/xfce/xfwm4
Xfce's window manager since version 4, one of the first with a built-in compositor and one of the last that insists on speaking only X11.
Olivier Fourdan wrote xfwm4 for Xfce 4.0, released in 2003 after the whole desktop had been rewritten on GTK 2. It follows ICCCM and EWMH, handles workspaces, keyboard shortcuts and Alt+Tab switching, and draws its frames from themes that are plain pixmap images plus a small themerc file, so simple that hundreds appeared. In Xfce 4.2, January 2005, xfwm4 gained its own compositor built on the Composite extension after Keith Packard's xcompmgr: shadows, transparency and an end to flicker, a year before Compiz and without requiring OpenGL.
That line has held. The compositor got vsync through GLX and XPresent in 4.14 (2019), but xfwm4 has never become a Wayland compositor. When Xfce 4.20 (2024) took its first steps towards Wayland, it did so with a different compositor, labwc, underneath the desktop. xfwm4 stays with X, where it does roughly what it did in 2005, only with fewer bugs.