How to find which window manager you are using in Linux?

    An XWindow manager(because we are talking about linux) runs on top of the XWindows system. The Window manager can be visualized like a controller that decides how the various windows in a desktop environment undergo transition. Based on the hardware capabilities of the system the graphical transitions of the windows are decided. There are various window managers available like compiz, kde, mutter, metacity, beryl and so on. Each window manager have their own way of managing the window operations.

   You can have more than one window manager in your system without any worries because the kernel of the OS and GUI are separate in linux so this doesn't tamper with you underlying OS kernel. But only one window manager can run at a time. In order to find out what is the default window manager is running in your system unless you have changed it, simple steps are available.

Method 1:

•  The simple way is to look into the process list to find out the window manager that is running active in the system. To do that,
•   pgrep -l compiz |cut -d " " -f2

•  You can replace compiz in the above command with name of other window managers like metacity , mutter etc

Method 2:

• By using the command wmctrl which is a command line utility for many window managers (linux,windows,etc) and is used to do variety of operations with the windows in the desktop.
• One of the functions of the wmctrl command is to display information about the current window manager. To achieve this,
• wmctrl -m
• But if you get a error like wmctrl not installed, no worries install it the traditional way,
• sudo apt-get install wmctrl
• After the installation again type the command wmctrl -m and find the current window manager in your system.

      

     Hope the information was useful and always don't worry when you face any difficulties with any software tool you use because there are always people out there to help.