// the take
Window Maker is a lightweight X11 window manager that recreates the NEXTSTEP look and feel, originally written by Alfredo Kojima and Dan Pascu and tied historically to the GNUstep project. This is a GitHub mirror of the canonical repo.or.cz repository, for people who want a fast, dock-and-clip style desktop without the overhead of GNOME or KDE.
Genuinely lightweight and fast even by today's standards, with memory-tuning knobs documented in the README (texture choice, animation toggles, icon cache sizing) rather than hand-waved. Supports Motif and NETWM hints, so it plays correctly with GNOME/KDE-aware apps instead of being an isolated silo. Ships its own widget toolkit (WINGs) and image library (wrlib) rather than depending on a heavier GUI stack, and has real internationalization with dozens of maintained .po translations.
X11 only — no Wayland support, which is a real ceiling as distros keep migrating compositors; there's no roadmap here for that transition. This is a passive mirror of repo.or.cz, not where actual development happens, so GitHub issues and PRs against it are likely a dead end. Only 9 stars/4 forks and a single push in nearly two years signals a very small maintenance crew for a C codebase of this age and size — expect slow turnaround on security or compositor-compatibility fixes. Crash debugging still relies on manual gdb/script workflows from the README rather than any modern tooling.
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →