I had installed icewm on a raspberry pi for a specific reason and noticed it had a raise/lower window function which reminded me of my old Amige workbench 1.3. I'm wondering if there are other window managers which have the specific function that can be enabled? Anyone else see it before?

SO it looks like thats a basic function of X windows. XFCE for example has Alt Shift PgDn keyboard shortcut mapped to lower.

I use e16 (old version of enlightenment) and it has the raise lower enabled.
Right-click on title bar offers:
Close
Annihilate
Iconify
Leave alone
Raise
Lower
Shade/Unshade
Stick/Unstick
and much more, including options to change size, stacking, border style, window grouping, opacity, and focus settings.

You might have a look at devilspie as well; if you want to automate some of these actions

Thanks, so what I'm trying to do is get the buttons for those on the title bar of each window.

Of the window managers I have a passing familiarity with, I know that Openbox, JWM and Fluxbox support keybindings / window menu entries for Raise and Lower. I would be surprised if Fvwm didn't have it. Plasma5's kwin_x11 has it.

Some of these can be used to replace the default window manager. I use kwin_x11 with Xfce4, for example, and occasionally with Mate. Openbox can also replace the default window manager.

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I make use of the Windowmaker feature of a double left click on the title bar to hide or display the window contents.

These days, most desktop environments seem to default "double-click on the title bar" to "maximize."

However, in the settings, you can usually find a way to change that to "shade" or "roll up." Where the setting is located depends on the DE, but it's usually under mouse, window, or desktop settings.

That's Shading. I think the OP means raising and lowering windows in the stack. You can set up your WM, for example, with Click to Focus and with Raise, so that the window is brought to the foreground when you click on it. Some window managers allow you to focus a window and receive input without raising it in the stack. Without bringing it to the front, in other words.

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That depends on the window manager you're using, if not IceWM.

In Windowmaker, I use Ctrl-Alt-Right or Ctrl-Alt-Left for raising and lowering windows in the stack. I do not have a use case for a window receiving input without being brought to the front.

When you get used to it it's incredibly handy (and extremely frustrating when the wm doesn't support it), for example if you have a shell window bottom-left and an editor/ide/documentation that is mostly overlapping it but leaves room to see the full command line. Rather than swap windows around continuously you just flick the mouse there (focus follows mouse) and run your related commands, and can always bring it to the front if you need to see all the output. Lots of other cases where you don't need to see everything but might want keyboard input to change something it's doing.

Also an Amiga veteran here. The xfce settings window doesn't have the buttons for raise/lower unfortunately so i just mapped the toggle-depth button on my Amiga theme to iconise although i almost never use it, and rely on shift-click-window or click-title to raise them which is usually more convenient anyway.

(as an aside, wouldn't it have been nice to have amiga menu's (global, but are hidden until you press the RMB) rather than the horrid hamburger menu or giant CSD borders to gain extra vertical work area).

Indeed. All of these intelligent ideas no longer welcome in the millennial world of eye candy.

I would really love to get Amiwm working but I can't get the 1.3patch to apply so I was going to try and see if I could make another WM similar. It seems there are a bunch of config files to xfce themes so I'm looking to see if I can enable those buttons on the titlebar. It looks like it should

from https://wiki.xfce.org/howto/xfwm4_theme

But that matches the windowmanager settings window and still doesn't have raise or lower - but at least you can put the close button in a sane location. Also there's gtk3 csd which are an unholy mess, assuming you haven't just disabled those (it is possible to fix the button positions at least using css).

Anyway if you're interested in the look as well as behaviour, this is what I use as my theme: http://www.zedzone.space/software/workbench-2.0.html but it includes widgets too (a slightly ugly mix, gtk2 -> wb2, gtk3 -> wb3). The gtk3 handles CSD windows as best it can including a fat bottom border so you actually resize windows. The git version is required for slackware-current and i'm still sometimes fiddling with it.

I had to finally give up on AmiWM a while ago, I can't remember why - probably multi-monitor support and perhaps 64-bit breakage.