Window Maker is a light-medium weight window manager for X11. That is, it is far easier on the resources than KDE or GNOME, but requires a bit more beef than XFCE or Icewm. Window Maker maintains a look and feel similar to the NeXTSTEP graphical user interface. What seperates Window Maker apart from most window managers is it's simplicity in design, ease of configuration, and useful features for such a lite-weight window manager.
Window Maker utilizes the GNUstep Object-Oriented application development framework. Support for gtk has been added and improvements underway. Window Maker now integrates easily with KDE and can be used as a window manger for GNOME.
One of the more unique features of Window Maker is the Dock. The dock is a customizeable "launcher" that holds both short-cut icons and running applications (dock apps). There is also a paperclip icon that allows for virtual desktop switching to which icons and dock apps can also be docked to.
Window maker supports themes and backgrounds that include jpg, tiff, and pixmaps extenstions. Window maker will run on numerous Unix Platforms.
Window maker is available from the Window Maker ftp site (ftp.windowmaker.org). Additional information can be obtained from the Window Maker web site (www.windowmaker.org). The web site has links to other resources (documentation, applications, dock apps, themes) and support locations. There is also a mailing list for users and developers.
This document will be covering some Window Maker basics. Topics will include installing Window Maker and Window Maker utilites, configuration, and customization.
The focus will be on version 64.0 which is available as of 2/10/2001.