Development of cwm started from patches to evilwm by Marius Aamodt Eriksen.

[9] cwm is a stacking window manager oriented towards heavy keyboard usage,[10][11] small footprint and ease of use.

While it lacks explicit virtual desktops functionality, it can be emulated by using the window groups mechanism.

[11] cwm allows raising, hiding, switching between, and searching for windows using just the keyboard, making it suitable to use as terminal emulator multiplexer.

[11] cwm is noted to be used mainly due to its status as one of the default window managers in OpenBSD,[14] though other reasons are sometimes cited.