The Golem X11 Window Manager

About

Golem is a fast, lightweight window manager for X11 which is very customizable. The newest version is 0.0.6 which you can download from the sourceforge golem page.

Latest News

March 1st, 2006: devel release 0.0.6 is available. This is very raw and just the first sync of new code. Some things that were working may be broken and lots of new features (and bugs) have been added. All bug reports are appreciated.

Older News

Golem's development has stagnated for a while and Jordan has given the project to Bruce Ashfield. Bruce is currently working on a new release which will have some existing patches applied. In short: Golem's back :)

If you want to join golem development or report bugs, you can do so in the golem development mailing list golem-devel@REMOVETHIS.lists.sourceforge.net.

Features

Small memory footprint
Window decoration customization (Themes) with multiple decoration styles (dgroups)
Multiple disjoint large virtual desktops
Hotkeys
Supports various focusing styles (sloppy, pointer, click)
Useful stuff for multiscreen displays (special focus cycling modes, etc)
Xinerama support for multimonitor screens
Plugins

pier

Similar to window maker's dock and afterstep's wharf

pager

pager interface

simple_menus

root menu interface

animations

animations for things like iconification, zooming, etc

netwm

netwm compliance plugin (not quite finished)

wmclass_defs

allows user to specifiy per-application preferences

sound

make golem noisy

session

simple (for now) startup management

box iconify

snapshot (or not) based icon management

set root

wallpaper management

tasklist

configurable mouse click on the background brings up the list of known clients and clicking on one restores/raises it.

Screenshots

All these themes and plugins come with the default distribution.

MicroGUI Theme (1280x1024, 344kByte)	AbsoluteE Theme (1280x1024, 832kByte)	eBlueSteel Theme (1280x1024, 813kByte)
MudGolem Theme (1280x1024, 647kByte)	Pager Plugin (1280x1024, 243kByte)	Pier Plugin (1024x768, 262kByte)

Interesting Stuff

Joshua Swink made a perl program that converts Window Maker style files to golem themes. You can get ahold of it at his page. (mirrored)
Andrew Sampson made a taskbar plugin. It can be obtained at his page. (mirrored)

Tested Platforms

FreeBSD (x86)
Linux (x86)

Authors

Golem is written from scratch by Jordan DeLong (fracture@removeme.allusion.net). Development has been passed to Bruce Ashfield (bruce@removeme.zedd.org). Contributions have been made by several people. Golem is distributable under the terms of a BSD-style license.

Florian octo Forster <octo@removeme.verplant.org>