w3wm is a tiling window manger for Windows, similar to i3 on Linux. It keeps your windows organized and allows you to use keyboard shortcuts in order to:
- move between windows
- move the windows themselves
- fullscreen the currently-selected window
- close the currently-selected window
- open new windows
w3wm is a modern desktop manager. It was built from the ground-up to support multiple monitors and monitors with varying DPIs. Simply start the program and enjoy a Windows experience with less mouse usage than ever before.
w3wm can be run at any time, whether it be at startup or at some time after startup.
Simply run the w3wm.exe executable (it is highly recommended to run as admin; most functionality will work even without administrator privileges, but certain inconveniences may exist, such as Win+L locking the screen even when Win+L is assigned to a different function).
w3wm will detect all your monitors and tile existing windows between those monitors.
When w3wm is running, there will be an icon in the notification area (the right-side of the toolbar), such that there is never any ambiguity over whether or not w3wm is running.
Users can fully customize the keyboard combinations used to control w3wm, but the default hotkeys are provided below.
| Move Focus | Keyboard Combination |
|---|---|
| up | Win+K |
| down | Win+J |
| right | Win+L |
| left | Win+H |
| Move Window | Keyboard Combination |
|---|---|
| up | Win+Shift+K |
| down | Win+Shift+J |
| right | Win+Shift+L |
| left | Win+Shift+H |
| w3wm Function | Keyboard Combination |
|---|---|
| Fullscreen current window | Win+F |
| Close current window | Win+D |
| Open new window | Win+N |
| Open new console | Win+Enter |
| Lock screen | Win+Home |
| Re-read configuration file | Win+R |
| Restart w3wm | Win+Shift+R |
| Quit w3wm | Win+Q |
In the same directory as w3wm.exe, there is a file called config.ini.
This file enables the user to, among other things, customize the hotkeys used above.
The default config.ini--which w3wm will automatically generate if the configuration file was deleted--describes the syntax used and provides usage examples and function/key names.
Note that w3wm must be informed of a configuration file update in order for the changes to apply.
The default hotkey to do this is Win+R.
The best starting point is the architecture documentation, which describes the general runtime structure of w3wm. From there, the w3Context would be a good place to get a top-down perspective of the main w3wm logic. Any technical questions or concerns can be made as a Github Issue with the question tag.