sowm

An itsy bitsy floating window manager (220~ sloc!).

Productivity Mobile & Desktop

Explore on GitHub Read Hacker News discussions

2Distinct people

2Mentions

0Explicit recommenders

956GitHub stars

REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

An itsy bitsy floating window manager (220~ sloc!).

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:03:16 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year2 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2021-11-03 08:07:40 UTC to 2025-05-26 08:41:51 UTC.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges

UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
Period	Start (UTC)	End (exclusive, UTC)	Mentions	Comments
2021	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1
2022	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
2023	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
2024	2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
2025	2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1

What Hacker News says

2 sources

alpaca128·May 26, 2025

Not sure about that Python project, but years ago I found this very minimal WM in a few hundred lines of C helpful: https://github.com/dylanaraps/sowm Was a lot easier to understand for me than, say, dwm.

In Plwm – An X11 window manager written in Prolog

liveprogramming·Nov 3, 2021

This is a great article and I remember reading it numerous times while I was implementing my own window manager. For someone interested in working on a really fun and rewarding hobby project a WM is a great one to look into since there are so many resources starting from really small implementations: - https://github.com/mackstann/tinywm - https://github.com/venam/2bwm - https://github.com/dylanaraps/sowm - https://github.com/dcat/swm - https://github.com/JLErvin/berry Which are great at introducing the concepts and allowing you to grok the required libraries. To larger more full featured packed window managers which will introduce you to more advanced topics: - https://github.com/baskerville/bspwm - https://github.com/herbstluftwm/herbstluftwm - https://www.nongnu.org/ratpoison/ - https://github.com/conformal/spectrwm Gradually as you ge

Read the rest

t more familiar with the ecosystem a few questions will come up: Should I use X11 or XCB? - I personally used XCB and didn't find it too difficult to interface with, and there are a large number of implementations which use it (2bwm, bspwm, ratpoison, etc) so you shouldn't have an issue with learning more about it. But the documentation is pretty limited. If you are just wanting to write a toy WM than X11 is perfectly fine. X or Wayland? - If you're wanting to write your first WM as a hobby project than I would recommend X over wayland just due to the much larger amount of reference material and documentation. You will have a much easier time getting your feet wet. Ignore the comments about X dying as it doesn't really matter for a hobby project, since the whole point is to have fun. Feel free to check out my window manager which is an example of what just reading this blog post and getting inspired can result in: https://github.com/cfrank/natwm

In How X Window Managers Work, and How to Write One (2014)