Window Maker: X11 window manager with the look and feel of the NeXTSTEP UI

Personally, i'd wish Window Maker wouldn't fall for pointless feature creep (in-built screenshot feature!?) and would instead replace WINGs with the GNUstep framework.

GNUstep has silently matured over the years but still lacks a real native window manager. Window Maker once aimed to be that but unfortunately didn't ever manage to fully integrate with GNUstep.

Fully porting Window Maker to GNUstep would be a Win-Win situation for all involved parties: GNUstep already features Wayland support and also offers a theming capabality for which WINGs' hardcoded and thus unchangeable NeXTSTEP aestetics are no match. So replacing WINGs with the GNUstep framework would instantly provide Wayland and more advanced theming support, for free.

People interested in an integrated Window Maker centric system based on Debian/Bookworm should have a look at https://wmlive.sourceforge.net and https://sourceforge.net/projects/wmlive/files/ for downloads.

What a blast from the past. WindowMaker served me well for many years, mainly on small screens. But once I started using multi-monitor setups, I switched to i3.

One thing: WindowMaker is easy to use yet full of options to customize the appearance and behaviour of windows, per-application and per-window.

Yet I think its killer feature for many years was the huge (64x64 pixel) "dock apps". There, you could put widgets with a ton of nice functionality, such as WiFi status, mailbox, disk monitoring — or just a clock. I don't remember if NeXTStep/WM were the first to offer those widgets, but I remember being a fond user of them.

Related: There is an in-development Wayland compositor for the Window Maker look and feel called wlmaker¹. It is already quite usable, but is very barebones right now.

¹ https://github.com/phkaeser/wlmaker

That brings me Etoile from memory: http://etoileos.com/etoile/ - it's like a mix of NeXTSTEP/GNUstep with Apple's Aqua. Sadly the project is pretty much dead - github shows last changes done 8, 10 and 11 years ago.

Back in 1998-1999, I was interested in installing and using Linux in large part because I thought that the screenshots of Window Maker that I saw online were so damn pretty. When I finally got to use it, I liked how "solid" it felt; the menus were big and large, they stuck to the screen even if you moved your mouse off of them, etc. I don't use Window Maker anymore, but it'll forever hold a special place in my heart.

Nice to see they're still doing updates to WindowMaker ("https://www.windowmaker.org/news/"). I last used it 25 years ago, but always liked it, and wouldn't have minded having an entire desktop that started with NextStep design.

(Lately, I use XMonad or i3wm on workstations that I use heavily. On systems that I use only rarely, I use the default Debian desktop, which currently is more Gnome-opinionated than I think is ideal for new user ramp-up, but it's stock.)

Still one of my faves, only edged out by tweaking XFCE to look like Mac OS Platinum: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2022/04/12/2330 (I love collapsing windows for some reason).

Unlike many here, I never grokked or really liked WindowMaker.

The biggest thing was how the dock icons were occupying too much precious screen space, and were distracting. Especially in the Olden Days when monitor ratios were 4:3. In contrast with a 16:9 or 16:10 modern monitor, where you can put things on the side and they'll be more out of focus.

Animated/informational dock icons, to show system stats or whatever, were more of a distraction than were worth it, and if you reduced the size of the dock icon then they became worthless. Couldn't have it both ways.

I did not like how big a dock icon was when you minimized a window. This was long after Windows 95 showed a thinner taskbar was perfectly sufficient.

I did not like the context menus that stuck around. Muscle memory, perhaps, but again: a distraction.

I did love its columnar file/tree navigator, which macOS continues to provide in Finder, although it's not a default!

All in all, it felt like an interesting exploration of the computer desktop UX space, but a dead end.

Also: https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace for various versions of Linux:

"NEXTSPACE is a desktop environment that brings a NeXTSTEP look and feel to Linux. I try to keep the user experience as close as possible to the original NeXT OS. It is developed according to the "OpenStep User Interface Guidelines"."

I remember that years go (probably 2014) I was in one of the biggest retail stores in Brazil and I saw a different looking operating system in the salesmen computers.

Years later I found that it was probably a Linux running Window Maker. It was surprising to see such a niche desktop environment being largely used by non-technical users

I've been using it since it came out. Before that, I used a NextStep theme for FVWM.

I'm dependent on WindowShade and wouldn't want to use a window manager without it.

I have the Window List menu pinned below the dock on the right side of the screen, from where it can pop out to full width if the mouse pointer touches the screen edge. I much prefer that over a "task bar" that doesn't show full titles but takes up a lot of space. (and no, I don't use other icons intended for the purpose)

I used to have my own patch with a few graphical tweaks but stopped compiling from source a long time ago.

If you like the aesthetic of this window manager, you may also like NsCDE:

https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE

I've personally used it on old 1.3 GHz P-III system running Debian 10, it's remarkably fast and usable even on such old hardware.

I used this for a couple years many many years ago. I even made several dock widgets for it for various purposes. The source code for these widgets even helped me get my first programming job!

Good memories!

I'm using it now. It's my primary wm for all my machines. I don't need a "desktop"; I just want something to manage windows. I don't "drag-n-drop". And I don't systemd, plus I kill as much of the rest of their FreeDesktop.Org code as I possibly can.

I've tried to switch to other wms, but I just can't get the same usefulness out of them, and end up switching back.

I'm in my forties and have been doing ironic retro window managers since I was a teen rocking olvwm on my slackware 486 box in the mid-nineties.

Months fade into years, which have faded into decades. My hair is graying and thinning, and the light at the end of the tunnel draws nearer. Yet not one single human soul has ever noticed or cared about my really impressive desktop setup.

Fond memories, using it extensively during my early years with Linux. I do still like very much the neat look and feel of the NeXTSTEP UI. A couple of months ago I attempted to develop a small example using the SDK and it was an extremely dissapointing experience. Not related to Objective-C per se, but the way you are supposed to develop GUI apps (GORM: is surprisingly convoluted and confusing to use it). That combined with the fact that documentation is scarce (and pretty bad) to non existant, made me to put it away within days. I actually picked up WindowMaker as an excuse to have a peek at Objective-C and play around a bit and see if I could do some silly GUI apps. Is there any good up to date documentation out there for doing GUI development with the GNUStep SDK? All resources that I found seem to be really old. Another WM that I used during my first contact with Linux was BlackBox, though don't know if still alive.

I kept it for a few years as my favorite WM, paired with Rox Filer with its panel switched off, that is, exclusively as a (very fast) file manager. WMaker turned out really useful when over 20 years back I had to set up lots of PCs for remote points of sale operations. Users should be able to do nothing beyond the strict necessary: send-receive mail, go to company's site, schedule remote management, print receipts, etc. No games or other distractions, no downloads, no customizable menus etc. Certainly not rocket science, but users would have very little computer experience, certainly none with Linux, therefore arranging user-proof kiosk-like desktops became mandatory or we would have been overwhelmed by complaints. WMaker did its job brilliantly, I put icons on the dock for all basic operations plus some safeguards to avoid deleting them and opening dangerous menus, and for what I know it still worked great when I left the company one year later. Good memories.

I am using it for twenty years now. With disabled dock it's a minimalism at its best. Looking at comments, I should give i3 a try.

I used to use Window Maker all the time on Slackware. It was wicked fast, barebones, reliable, configurable. I just noticed it's packaged for Alpine (my current distro), I'll have to revisit it

Who does this appeal to and why? I use Rectangle on OSX to give me the layout options I need which basically amounts to switching between full screen and two apps split vertically, then I use the in-built OSX shortcuts for moving apps between screens.

What kind of workflows suit something as advanced as Window Maker? Where does the line sit between this and something like Gnome? I'm struggling to get my head around the nuances.

Really has that retro-cool look down pat, a bit like CDE. My journey was Openbox -> i3 -> bspwm, but I always wanted to try it just for the aesthetics.

Ha! Long time since I’ve seen that. That was the first open source project I got involved in and wrote the FAQ off irc and mailing list questions.

I remember trying both WindowMaker and AfterStep on RedHat 4.2 (or maybe 5.0). I picked AfterStep because it handled 256-color mode better. It wasn't long after that I had a card that could do 16-bit color and left AfterStep behind. Still I have a fond respect for those window managers, trying to build a desktop environment that was outside the box for the time.

I tried Window Maker because I liked the aesthetics of NeXTSTEP when I'd used it. On Linux though, I just couldn't get used to the left-side scrollbars. It was ok on NeXTSTEP because that's how that always was, but seeing my Linux like that was one STEP too far.

That's a name i haven't heard in a long time... Window Maker was my first desktop interface when I started Linux. Though I can see in 20 years not much seems to have change, it is good to see it is not dead. It is quite a unique style.

Too bad GNUstep never got popular

I ran this way back in probably the late 1990s in my college dorm!

Taking me back to when I first installed Linux back in 2001.

WM-Live is built-off of the Debian/Bookworm 12.1 ISO.

Reminds me of the Open BSD team's incremental modification of proprietary ATT code.

Will dd 0.96 onto an optical drive soon.

Try wlmaker? https://github.com/phkaeser/wlmaker

Used that for years on my Gentoo installation back when I had more time to spend on my home computer. Can't recommend it enough.

This is nostalgic. I think I used to use sawfish/sawmill in those days. These days, I just use i3. Nothing extra.

I miss dock apps.

Missing AfterStep from back in the day.

I miss the abundance of dock apps. It'd be neat if those could make a comeback.

I used it for years on FreeBSD and hacked around its many parts. So much nostalgia!

I ran this on my Sparc 10 for a few years (late 90's, early 2000's.)

Happy memories! I switched to i3, but man...yeah those were the days. I even built my workstation at the time to mimic the black-cube look of a NeXTcube.

used it for years, .. then switched to i3. Never looked back :)

Is this the window manger that’s shipped with ps2 Linux?

Used it for many years on various machines, good stuff!

Dude I need this for MacOS 8. God I would pay so much money for a replica iMac with MacOS 8.