Sawfish - still the best ever window manager

It's lite, very functional and very customisable. Like Emacs, it is completely extensible by writing lisp functions. Also like Emacs, some standard functions are in fact in lisp themselves.

On machines without full gnome installs (or perhaps without the resources for the insanely resource-hungry gnome-panel), you can build up a good level of UI functionality with lisp add-ins.

The most important extension is the pager by Daniel Pfeiffer sawfish.wm.ext.pager.

I'm still looking for a window/icon dock a la twm or NeXT - maybe time to learn some more lisp...

Sawfish used to be THE window manager - it was the default for GNOME and thus RedHat. As of GNOME 2 and RedHat 9, metacity has replaced it as the default and sawfish development seems to have disappeared into a black hole.

Funny thing is, that doesn't matter. Sawfish still has more features than metacity, and if you want an extra feature, it's just a short lisp proc away.

A good source of info and lisp snippits is the Sawfish wiki: http://sawfish.uberstyle.net/ and this sawfish lisp repository: http://www.sics.se/~lofgren/sawmill/repository.html

Update: See this blog entry for info about cygwin and sawfish.wm.ext.pager under cygwin.