Enlightenment (window manager)
window manager for Unix-like operating systems
Enlightenment, also known simply as E, is a compositing window manager for the X Window System. Since version 0.20, Enlightenment also supports Wayland. It is shipped with some Linux distributions such as Bodhi Linux and Pentoo.
Enlightenment is only a window manager at its core; however, with many modules included, it can be extended to resemble a full desktop environment. Since version 0.17 (E17), Enlightenment has been written with the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL), and the Enlightenment project also writes a set of applications with the EFL.
History
E16 and before
The first version of Enlightenment was released by Carsten Haitzler in 1997. Originally, it was just a window manager before the addition of the EFL in E17.
With the release of E17 written with the EFL in 2012, Enlightenment went through a major rewrite, splitting the codebase into 0.16 (E16) and the versions after (E17). Some of the community decided to stay with the E16 codebase and continue development of this version, releasing under an independent versioning scheme from E17. It reached the 1.0 milestone and is still actively developed as of 2025.
E17 and later
In 2000, the development of the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries started to create a toolkit for writing applications that interoperate with Enlightenment, as well as other X window managers, too.
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This entry incorporates text from “Enlightenment (window manager)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.