Software Alternatives & Reviews

herbstluftwm VS IceWM

Compare herbstluftwm VS IceWM and see what are their differences

herbstluftwm logo herbstluftwm

herbstluftwm is a manual tiling window manager for X11 using Xlib and Glib.

IceWM logo 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.
  • herbstluftwm Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-11
  • IceWM Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-05-07

herbstluftwm videos

Window Manager Hopping: Herbstluftwm

More videos:

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

IceWM videos

Obscure Window Manager Project - IceWM

More videos:

  • Tutorial - IceWM Tutorial - The fastest Linux window manager
  • Demo - antiX 19 beta 3 IceWM Demo Features Review II

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to herbstluftwm and IceWM)
Window Manager
35 35%
65% 65
Linux
26 26%
74% 74
Utilities
35 35%
65% 65
Qt
33 33%
67% 67

User comments

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Reviews

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

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

IceWM Reviews

We have no reviews of IceWM yet.
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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, herbstluftwm seems to be more popular. It has been mentiond 8 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.

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
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IceWM mentions (0)

We have not tracked any mentions of IceWM yet. Tracking of IceWM recommendations started around Mar 2021.

What are some alternatives?

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

bspwm - A tiling window manager based on binary space partitioning

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.

Fluxbox - Fluxbox is a window manager for X that was based on the Blackbox 0.61.1 code.

Openbox - Openbox is a highly configurable, next generation window manager with extensive standards support.

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