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How do I get a list of all available windows managers on a linux system (Of course this would mostly not be needed but - I don't have root permissions). Very difficult to search on Google as all results returned are for "list of window managers for linux".

Clarification: I am looking for a command that lists "All window managers that are installed" on the system that I am working on.

Interested to know it's distro dependent. My distro is RedHat.

cat /proc/version
(Linux version 2.4.21-40.ELsmp (centos@sillage.bis.pasteur.fr) (gcc version 3.2.3 20030502 (Red Hat Linux 3.2.3-53)) #1 SMP Wed Mar 15 13:46:01 EST 2006)
Pika Supports Ukraine
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4 Answers4

7

It really depend on your particular distribution or OS. Say, on debian and ubuntu one uses:

$ update-alternatives --list x-window-manager
/usr/bin/twm
/usr/bin/fvwm2
/usr/bin/beryl
/usr/bin/beryl-xgl
/usr/bin/icewm
/usr/bin/kwin
/usr/bin/wmaker
Alexander Gorshenev
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4

A couple more places I found on Debian:

grep "^Exec" /usr/share/xsessions/*

grep -l "section=.Window Managers." /usr/share/menu/*

(In the second, we may want to check the command= part of each file.)

And on an old Gentoo I noticed:

find /etc/X11/Sessions/* -printf '%f\n'
joeytwiddle
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3

Depends on your distribution/package manager. Most package managers will probably not even have a category "window managers".

Anyway, in gentoo you'd do:

$ eix -I -C x11-wm --only-names
x11-wm/enlightenment
x11-wm/twm
chris
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2

On Slackware there is nice xwmconfig, but I'm not sure if it exists on other distributions.

mih
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