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This is one of those "time flies" blog posts, because it feels a bit like yesterday: katriawm started in December 2015. The first commit was made on 2015-12-23, which was ten years ago.

katriawm was just an experiment initially, a learning project, and I didn’t plan on using it as my main environment. But it worked surprisingly well for me, so I just kept using it.

I consider it one of my most successful projects, because I use it every day, all the time. Naturally, I’m holding on to it (and, by extension, X11). And it was a ton of fun to make in 2015.

And I really mean 2015. Most of the code was written in the very early days and then only minor pieces later on:

The recent bump in 2025 was caused by the addition of support for drawing application icons in the top left corner. This was an indulgence on my part – it’s not really needed and lots of WMs don’t show them, but it looks nice, so I added it.

I can only speculate about the future of the project. It is very likely that I will not "port it to Wayland", because that would mean throwing away almost all code and starting from scratch. Maybe, some day, I might fork dwl and add the features that I’m currently missing. Setting up a minimal-ish non-tiling desktop based on labwc might be another option. Either way, there is more dust that has to settle first. Or maybe X.Org just remains available longer than we think and I can just keep using my WM.

It’s been a great ten years for me (in terms of window management). We’ll see what comes next.