How To: Find Out Which Window Manager You’re Using
Today’s article shouldn’t be all that long or difficult, as we simply go over how to find out which window manager you’re using. In the Linux world, this is often abbreviated as “WM” but we’ll avoid using the abbreviation ’cause of search engines. Yeah, search engines have a lot to do with how this (and every other) site is configured – including deciding how I write articles.
Yay! We need to appeal to you AND the algorithms. We’re all slaves to the machine!
So, what is a window manager? We can cheat and cite the Arch Wiki (a brilliant source for all things Linux). They define window managers as:
A window manager (WM) is system software that controls the placement and appearance of windows within a windowing system in a graphical user interface (GUI). It can be part of a desktop environment (DE) or be used standalone.
Further, there are the following clues:
Window managers are X clients that control the appearance and behaviour of the frames (“windows”) where the various graphical applications are drawn. They determine the border, title bar, size, and ability to resize windows, and often provide other functionality such as reserved areas for sticking dockapps like Window Maker, or the ability to tab windows like Fluxbox. Some window managers are even bundled with simple utilities like menus to start programs or to configure the window manager itself.
Now, in modern times, most of you will be using the window manager that came with your distro and you’ll just leave it as the default. This article is for that person – the person who didn’t install their window manager and doesn’t know which window manager they’re using.
Which Display Manager Are You Using:
You guessed it! You’re going to need to use a terminal for this. Oh, there are surely GUI ways to do this, but I know you have a terminal. You can just press CTRL + ALT + T to open your default terminal.
With your terminal, you can run the following command:
How to determine which window managers are installed from the command line?
There’s no way to find all window managers programmatically because any program could potentially act as a window manager and it’s impossible to write a program that knows what an arbitrary program does. However, if you limit the search to window managers provided by a Debian package, there’s an easy way. All window managers in Debian provide the x-window-manager alternative.
update-alternatives --list x-window-manager @RuiFRibeiro “Gnome” isn’t a window manager. Individual window managers provide the x-window-manager alternative, e.g. metacity , mutter , …
This psstree command displays the window manager(s) presently use. And group the result(s) per application and their relationships with other item(s).
Below is the same answer as above. But with details if you’re interested in those.
- If not already done, execute this command to install the «pstree» package sudo apt-get install pstree
- Using Terminal/Command line, execute this command psstree
- Within the result, search for the keyword «gdm». On the right side of «gdm» is the presently use Window Manager. For example:
One of the main benefit of pstree is that if you have mutliple Window Manager use at once, then pstree will display which Window Manager is use per application. Plus the application relationship with other items.
pstree has many optional parameters. For example, execute this command to display only trees rooted at processes of this user