Building Window Manager For Windows

Posted on Sep 8, 2022

tl;dr: I created a tiling window manager for Windows - pywinman

Why?

Recently I’ve decided to play around with win32 and python to create my own window manager for windows. After a brief research, I found out that available options are cumbersome. Also, free options are scarce or not maintained in decades. Not only that, but I had additional requirements such as:

being opensource
requiring 0 installation
available without administrative rights
with little to no dependencies- working on Windows 10

With such narrow scope I had no choice but to develop my own. There is a solution from tzbob(github) that almost covers all the points but it hasn’t been updated for more than 10 years. Others like bug.n have excellent solution for windows but requires additional AutoHotKey to work, witch is not suitable for my environment.

pywinman

So I created a pywinman witch I intend to develop from scratch and using only ctypes to integrate with Windows. I got heavily inspired by i3wm due to its simplicity and ease of use. I will be happy if I manage to recreate at least a fraction of its functionality.

There will be a multi-monitor support, configuration with python and configurable presets.
If you interested in the progress of this project or just you would like to keep an eye on my updates in blog be sure to follow me on twitter. Also, I would appreciate if you would give a star to pywinman on GitHub if you like.