Software Alternatives & Reviews

bspwm VS herbstluftwm

Compare bspwm VS herbstluftwm and see what are their differences

bspwm logo bspwm

A tiling window manager based on binary space partitioning

herbstluftwm logo herbstluftwm

herbstluftwm is a manual tiling window manager for X11 using Xlib and Glib.
  • bspwm Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-09-14
  • herbstluftwm Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-11

bspwm videos

Switching To Bspwm - Initial Thoughts

More videos:

  • Review - BSPWM - Its like I3 but not.
  • Review - BSPWM Review

herbstluftwm videos

Window Manager Hopping: Herbstluftwm

More videos:

  • Review - Herbstluftwm overview
  • Review - Obscure Window Manager Project - Herbstluftwm

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to bspwm and herbstluftwm)
Window Manager
69 69%
31% 31
Linux
75 75%
25% 25
Utilities
78 78%
22% 22
Productivity
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

Share your experience with using bspwm and herbstluftwm. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
Log in or Post with

Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare bspwm and herbstluftwm

bspwm Reviews

Top 13 Best Tiling Window Managers For Linux In 2022
Support for multiple windows, limited support for EWMH, automatic mode for automatically determining the location of app tiles, and configuration and control via messages are among the characteristics of bspwm.
Source: www.hubtech.org
13 Best Tiling Window Managers for Linux
bspwm’s features include support for multiple windows, partial support for EWMH, automatic mode for automatically setting the position of app tiles, and it is configured and controlled through messages, among others.
Source: www.tecmint.com

herbstluftwm Reviews

Top 13 Best Tiling Window Managers For Linux In 2022
Tags (workspaces or virtual desktops), a startup setup script, exactly one tag per monitor, and other features are among herbstluftwm’s highlights. Learn more about herbstluftwm in our article.
Source: www.hubtech.org
13 Best Tiling Window Managers for Linux
herbstluftwm’s main features include tags (i.e. workspaces or virtual desktops), a configuration script which runs at startup, exactly one tag per monitor, etc. Learn more from our article on herbstluftwm here.
Source: www.tecmint.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, bspwm should be more popular than herbstluftwm. It has been mentiond 20 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

bspwm mentions (20)

  • What WM should I use?
    Use BSPWM. It supports right clicks by default and its modular. You might want to look for status bars that work with it, slstatus does not work. Good luck, supremacist! Source: about 1 year ago
  • What are some OpenSource apps that are the best of their kind?
    I had not heard of bspwm but I am a fan of telling WMs. Looking at the documentation now, I really like the pragmatic approach lol https://github.com/baskerville/bspwm. Source: about 1 year ago
  • Got some questions before moving to linux...
    I am not familiar with that distro at all, so no idea. KDE Plasma is fine, I use it myself (with BSPWM as my window manager, but that's irrelevant). Source: about 1 year ago
  • MacBook Setup - OS Ventura 13.1 - Samsung QLed 43” - VM: yabai - Terminal: Hyper
    There's a paradigm shift required for a lot of people to start using automatic tiling window managers. Yabai is basically a bspwm port for MacOS and it follows the rules of binary space partitioning. In fact, bspwm has a great diagram on its github readme that illustrates how it works. This will limit the number of windows you can have on any given desktop. To overcome this limitation you use multiple desktops. A... Source: over 1 year ago
  • How much better is neoVim? Is it really that much better than VsCode?
    It’s night and day. I also combine a heavily customized NeoVim config (https://github.com/tomit4/notes/tree/main/nvim) with a tiling window manager (https://github.com/baskerville/bspwm), the espanso text expander (https://espanso.org/), Vimium in the browser (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/), and a 40% ortholinear keyboard(https://drop.com/buy/planck-mechanical-keyboard). Source: over 1 year ago
View more

herbstluftwm mentions (8)

  • Ideal Monitor Rotation for Programmers
    It's exactly how it works but only if you have mutliple screens. My comment was that, for this reason, 2 or 3 smaller (ish- ~27") 16:9 4k screens [1] (previously, 4–6 even smaller 4:3 screens) works much better for me because I can switch the spaces on my Macbook and i3/Sway virtual desktops on my Linux machine individually for each screen. If we're talking about having a smaller number of giant screens it would... - Source: Hacker News / 4 months ago
  • What softwares do you recommend to a daily use BSD system?
    The nicities that I pull would be the file browser from ROX, and a tiling window manager such as herbstluftwm. I could do everything I do today without these, such as with a terminal or OpenBSD's 'cwm', but I really enjoy using them! Source: over 1 year ago
  • Berry is a healthy, byte-sized window manager written in C for Unix systems
    While people are discussing window managers, one of the most overlooked window manager is: hersbtluftwm.[0] If you even work with multiple monitors, give it a try. It uses the monitor swapping feature from xmonad but comes with simplicity of editing the config (one doesn't need to learn new programming language to edit config). It's a pretty cool window manager! [0]: https://herbstluftwm.org/. - Source: Hacker News / almost 2 years ago
  • Looking for a FancyZones-like tiling manager for Linux
    Herbstluftwm (https://herbstluftwm.org/) has two ways to achieve what you want. And it plays nice with XFCE (and probably KDE) so you don't have to give up a traditional DE to use it. Source: over 2 years ago
  • Desktop environments on new operating system. (Debian 11 Bullseye)
    I can forgive not including tiling WMs like i3, notion, and herbstluftwm because tiling WMs are, by nature, not very photogenic. But leaving out KDE Plasma, WindowMaker, amiwm, or Enlightenment too? I want my money back! :). Source: over 2 years ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing bspwm and herbstluftwm, you can also consider the following products

i3 - A dynamic tiling window manager designed for X11, inspired by wmii, and written in C.

qtile - Qtile is a full-featured, hackable tiling window manager written in Python.

dwm - dwm is a dynamic window manager for X. It manages windows in tiled, monocle and floating layouts. All of the layouts can be applied dynamically, optimising the environment for the application in use and the task performed.

IceWM - icewm home page . Bug Tracking. If you have a patch, a bug report or a feature request to submit, please do so at the icewm project page at SourceForge.

awesome - A dynamic window manager for the X Window System developed in the C and Lua programming languages.

monsterwm - tiny but monstrous tiling window manager. Contribute to c00kiemon5ter/monsterwm development by creating an account on GitHub.