Let's also not forget the unsung hero of the "let's pretend we're NextStep" saga, "bowman" (a fvwm hack). A much shorter shelf-life than its successors AfterStep and WindowMaker, but the one that started it all...
This brings back memories of going from one window manager to the next (blackbox, fluxbox, or enlightment anyone?) and fiddling with the configuration endlessly. Now I don't think twice and just use whatever the default is.
Aww. I miss using Window Maker. I used to maintain the FAQ as it was the first software project I was involved with. To set the era, newsgroups were active but dying, freenode irc was shiny and new, freshmeat (now defunct) hadn't launched yet, linux.com hadn't lost millions, and slashdot hadn't launched, and Linux was a pita to keep working on my Dell laptops.<p>I still give people the advice to get involved with a project even if just in a docs roll at first.
The fondest computing memories I have is my Pentium II 233 mhz machine, with 128 MB RAM, running a heavily tuned debian with window maker on a 15 inch trinitron nokia monitor. It was the best window manager on the best monitor of the era. For its time it was an amazing hardware and software combination. I went from that system to a mac mini, and although in many ways it was a step up, the OS X window manager and dock were definitely a step down.
Wow, I have fond memories of using WindowMaker. I was really excited to see some recent development with new featuers this past summer (<a href="http://windowmaker.org/news.php" rel="nofollow">http://windowmaker.org/news.php</a>). I spent a few days with it, I was surprised at some of the defaults. For instance, click to raise isn't enabled by default. That's probably how I used it all those years ago. Anyway, I agree it's lovely. The main things I was missing were modern looking applets (but the Wolfenstein-face CPU monitor is classic), and also better compositor integration (for stuff like expose-style window switching).
I use a tiling wm (i3) now, but before that it was Window Maker all the way, from 1998 until about 2012. Fantastic piece of software: straightforward, clean, and beautiful to look at.
You can have pretty much the same UI in Openbox today.<p>Openbox + devilspie + xcompmgr + rxvt-unicode + Firefox with Pentadactyl is perfect. Especially on a 1440x900 12" X200s.