Ion Window Manager

Ion is a somewhat minimalist X11 WindowManager which does not partially overlap windows being managed. It is usable with both the keyboard or the pointing device, favouring the keyboard.

The screen is divided into frames, each of which can have as many windows as wanted. Within a frame, only one window is visible at a time; a system of tabs in the title bar space is used to switch between them. There is support for as many workspaces (like VirtualDesktop?s) as need be.

It resembles screen(1) in its multiplexing of the available display (see ScreenMultiplexor).

The website is at http://iki.fi/tuomov/ion/

A more brutal WM along the same lines is RatpoisonWindowManager.

Ion uses the LuaLanguage as an extension and configuration language. See the Ion-devel WikiWiki at http://wiki.ael.be/ion/ for documentation, scripts, configuration files and other tricks and thoughts.

For me, Ion is the only window manager worth running. If it is not available, I use the Linux console or screen. -- PanuKalliokoski

Development of ion stopped sometime in 2009. More recently a fork called notion is being actively maintained and is available here: http://notion.sourceforge.net/

Also see TiledWindows.

CategoryWindowManager