VWM

VWM (Viper Window Manager) is an extensible, open source, lightweight window manager that can be used inside your Linux Terminal (console/text-mode). It has been created using the libviper and libpseudo libraries, which can be installed on your GNU/Linux operating system separately or during the installation of VWM, from the official software repositories.

A drop-in replacement for Screen

The project has been created as a drop-in replacement for the Screen command-line application, but it provides a more visual alternative that can be easily extended with Mozilla-style plugins.

Because it runs entirely inside your Linux Terminal, Viper Window Manager can be used only with your keyboard. However, support for mouse devices can be provided via GPM (General Purpose Mouse).

Getting started with VWM

The Viper window manager can be easily installed on many distributions of GNU/Linux straight from their official software repositories through a command-line or graphical package manager application.

Alternatively, if the application is not available in the software repos of your distro, you can simply download the latest source package from Softoware, save it somewhere on your computer, unpack it and nagivate to the location of the extracted folder in a terminal emulator (e.g. cd /home/softoware/vwm).

Then, move to the upstream directory with the ‘cd upstream’ command, run the ‘make’ command to compile everything, and then run the ‘make install’ command as root or the ‘sudo make install’ command as a privileged user to install the Viper window manager system wide.

Under the hood

Taking a look under the hood of the VWM project, we can notice that it is written entirely in the C programming language. At the moment, the software has been successfully tested on computers supporting either of the 32-bit or 64-bit instruction set architectures. Check the official homepage for more details.

What is new in this release:

• The internal clock was replaced with a POSIX driven clock.
• The signal I/O events for VTerm are now more precise.

What is new in version 2.1.1:

• This release has a minor bugfix, and requires libviper 1.4.5 or greater.

What is new in version 2.0.2:

• Makefile fixes and minor enhancement to desktop wallpaper.

What is new in version 2.0.1:

• SIGIO event accelerator
• New terminal shell
• Code sync to new libpseudo

What is new in version 1.4.0:

• Major version release to sync with libviper 1.4.x API changes.

Requirements:

• libviper