Hi, the author here. I'm excited to share FancyWM. It started as a passion project, I made it for myself after using tiling window managers on Linux for a while. It has recently acquired some of the final must-have features in my book, so I thought I would share it here.
Some of the criteria that I set for myself and couldn't find implemented elsewhere (together and the way I wanted them):
- Basic and unintrusive UI
- Dynamic layouts (no editing mode, no predefined finite set of layouts)
- Stack panels (tabs)
- Smooth window resizing and animations
- Simple to configure
- Efficient to use with mouse or keyboard
- Support for the Windows virtual desktop feature
- Doesn't interfere with other apps' keyboard shortcuts
The tiling idiom is based around "panels", of which there are 3 types: horizontal (default for a 16:9 workspace), vertical, and stack panel (tabs).
1. You create a vertical panel, and the focused window is automatically put into it.
2. You open a new window, and the new window is put in the focused panel.
You now have two windows stacked one above the other
There are hotkeys to move windows around, swap windows, resize windows, etc. But if you are a mouse user, you can also do that efficiently. If any hotkeys are missing, please open a feature request.
Some smaller notable UX features:
- The mouse-based controls for windows have a trigger condition that requires you to move just past the top border of the window. I don't ever see the overlay show up when I didn't intend to open it.
- Context-sensitive hints appear shortly after triggering the activation hotkey, and remind you which keybindings you have set up and which you can use currently.
- A focus highlight option briefly blinks the focused window.
A burning question I've been asked on Reddit several times is "is it free and open-source?". The answer is no (and I have no plans to do that). Parts of the projects have been split off and published on GitHub and NuGet (WinMan - an event-based windowing library; you can build a WM with it). There is also a public issue and feature tracker on GitHub.
FancyWM is a commercial product with an unlimited evaluation period. You must buy a lifetime license for continuous use. I understand that not everyone can afford to buy a license, which is why FancyWM aims to be perfectly usable without one -- but you will get the occasional pop-up asking you to buy it (like WinRAR or Sublime Text). I know what is affordable also varies with markets, so I'm hoping that the Microsoft Store dynamic pricing can handle that somewhat reasonably. As a student, I am super happy and grateful for every single purchase.
An author here. elfshaker uses per-file deduplication. When building manyclangs packs, we observed that the deduplicated content is about 10 GiB in size. After compression with `elfshaker pack`, that comes down to ~100 MiB.
There is also a usability difference: elfshaker stores data in pack files, which are more easily shareable. Each of the pack files released as part of manyclangs ~100 MiB and contains enough data to materialize ~2,000 builds of clang and LLVM.
Some of the criteria that I set for myself and couldn't find implemented elsewhere (together and the way I wanted them): - Basic and unintrusive UI - Dynamic layouts (no editing mode, no predefined finite set of layouts) - Stack panels (tabs) - Smooth window resizing and animations - Simple to configure - Efficient to use with mouse or keyboard - Support for the Windows virtual desktop feature - Doesn't interfere with other apps' keyboard shortcuts
The tiling idiom is based around "panels", of which there are 3 types: horizontal (default for a 16:9 workspace), vertical, and stack panel (tabs). 1. You create a vertical panel, and the focused window is automatically put into it. 2. You open a new window, and the new window is put in the focused panel. You now have two windows stacked one above the other
There are hotkeys to move windows around, swap windows, resize windows, etc. But if you are a mouse user, you can also do that efficiently. If any hotkeys are missing, please open a feature request.
Some smaller notable UX features: - The mouse-based controls for windows have a trigger condition that requires you to move just past the top border of the window. I don't ever see the overlay show up when I didn't intend to open it. - Context-sensitive hints appear shortly after triggering the activation hotkey, and remind you which keybindings you have set up and which you can use currently. - A focus highlight option briefly blinks the focused window.
A burning question I've been asked on Reddit several times is "is it free and open-source?". The answer is no (and I have no plans to do that). Parts of the projects have been split off and published on GitHub and NuGet (WinMan - an event-based windowing library; you can build a WM with it). There is also a public issue and feature tracker on GitHub.
FancyWM is a commercial product with an unlimited evaluation period. You must buy a lifetime license for continuous use. I understand that not everyone can afford to buy a license, which is why FancyWM aims to be perfectly usable without one -- but you will get the occasional pop-up asking you to buy it (like WinRAR or Sublime Text). I know what is affordable also varies with markets, so I'm hoping that the Microsoft Store dynamic pricing can handle that somewhat reasonably. As a student, I am super happy and grateful for every single purchase.
I am happy to answer any questions you have. Issues and feature requests: https://github.com/fancywm/fancywm-issues