IceWM | Window Manager

IceWM is a window manager for the X Window System. The goal of IceWM is speed, simplicity, and not getting in the user’s way. It comes with a taskbar with pager, global and per-window keybindings and a dynamic menu system. Application windows can be managed by keyboard and mouse. Windows can be iconified to the taskbar, to the tray, to the desktop or be made hidden. They are controllable by a quick switch window (Alt+Tab) and in a window list. A handful of configurable focus models are menu-selectable. Setups with multiple monitors are supported by RandR and Xinerama. IceWM is very configurable, themeable and well documented. It includes an optional external background wallpaper manager with transparency support, a simple session manager and a system tray. IceWM is available on popular Linux distributions like Debian, Ubuntu, Arch, OpenSUSE, Gentoo, Slackware, CentOS, antiX, NixOS and on most *BSDs.
IceWM was created by Marko Maček in 1997 using C++. It is now maintained at Github.
The latest released version is 4.1.0 (2026-08-06).
The IceWM Screenshots Collection
IceWM is themeable. The visual appearance of icewm can be changed by a theme, which is a collection of settings and small images. Over 450 themes can be downloaded from box-look.org. Extra is a collection of 91 highlights. See icewm -i list.
IceWM is translated into three dozen languages. To improve the translation for your language at Weblate, first register an account either here or there, then update.
Report your icewm bugs on Github. Only report it once and give relevant details.
Gettext must be installed.
If you have cmake, an alternative is:
To install all package dependencies in one go use the following script.
Verify package dependencies by:
IceWM is released under the terms of the GNU Library General Public License.
Contribute to ongoing development and support of IceWM by donating.