IceWM 3.9 Released With Few Enhancements To This Speedy X11 Window Manager

Written by Michael Larabel in Desktop on 31 August 2025 at 06:18 AM EDT. 20 Comments

IceWM Is out this weekend as the newest feature release to this X11 window manager known for its speedy and simplicity.

IceWM 3.9 brings improvements particularly around its cursor handling to now support Xcursor files rather than requiring XPM cursors. There is also now support for themed cursors in gdk-pixbuf without depending upon the libXpm library. Plus IceWM 3.9 brings a few fixes.

👁 IceWM

The official change-log for IceWM 3.9 includes:

Features
- If a theme doesn't define a cursor, prefer the system Xcursor theme.
- Add support for themed cursors to gdk-pixbuf without requiring libXpm.
- Add support for Xcursor files as an alternative to XPM cursors.
- Add new -kovered filter to icesh to test if a client is covered.

Fixes
- When lseek on /proc/net/dev fails, avoid it for the future.
- Ensure that _NET_CLIENT_LIST_STACKING is always up-to-date.
- Correct red and blue colors in icesh for loadicon and saveicon.
- When truncating a title in icesh, respect UTF-8 codepoint boundaries.

Changes
- When the cursor X/Y-hotspot is absent in a XPM, smart guess it.
- Updated languages: Spanish, Hungarian, Portuguese_Brazil.

Downloads and more information on the IceWM 3.9 window manager release via GitHub.