Standout features
What makes them special?
The Enlightenment project started as a window manager. It has since also evolved a set of libraries called Enlightenment Foundation Libraries, which are used to create a host of applications such as Terminology (a terminal emulator), Rage (a media player), Ephoto (an image viewer) and more. One of its main aims is to be highly configurable, which it is while remaining lightweight and fast. That’s a win in our books.
Being a manual tiling window manager, i3 automatically resizes open windows as you launch new applications. It does give you the choice of placing the applications either vertically across the screen or horizontally with just a key-stroke. You can also switch to the floating mode, which enables you to bring the chosen window into the foreground. You can also use different layout on different virtual screens, which are accessed by pressing Alt+[09] key combo. The status bar at the bottom is home to quite a bit of useful information, such as disk and RAM usage.
You can completely control awesome using only your keyboard. Like i3, awesome also provides a number of workspaces that are called tags, and each tag has a different layout. The project offers a choice of a dozen different layouts, and you can assign a different one to each of the tags. These layouts can be configured using the layouts variable in the ~/.config/awesome/rc.lua config file. Icewm’s ease of configuration and abundant themes serve as its USP. We also appreciate its speed and intuitive interface. The fvwm3 window manager is highly configurable, but the lack of dedicated documentation means that it isn’t quite ready for the masses just yet.