On Wed, 5 Jun 2019, Ronald F. Guilmette wrote:
The default theme for fvwm includes a big box that appears in the lower
right hand corner of the screen. Is there a name for that whole thing?
I guess it is some instance of a FvwmButtons (there can be more than one,
even nested, for instance I have three or five: a control panel, a pager
and a performance meter, and a couple of labels ... the control one is
always present in the top right corner, a label with the desktop name in
the bottom right, and a motto in the bottom left ... the last two items of
my control FvwmButtons are two buttons which toggle the visibility of the
pager and the performance meter, they appear just below the control panel
and partly overlap (usually the pager hides the top items in the
performance meter, that's why I can toggle them on/off). I posted an URL
with screendumps in an earlier posting.
Anyway, that wide but not very tall box includes several different parts:
the configuration of the FvwmButtons is a sort of grid, and can contain
containers.
If you add/replace an item in the FvwmButtons you have to take into
account its position and geometry, and coordinate this geometry with the
individual tool geometry.
For instance my control panel is defined as having 9 rows:
row 1 is a container with two buttons side by side (toggle task bar)
row 2 contains the current date
rows 3 and 4 contains a digital clock (xdaliclock) and this is
defined to be double height !!
row 5 is a contained with 4 buttons side by side (toggles desktop as
1 page, 1x2 pages, 2x1 pages or 2x2 pages0
row 6 contains indicators whether other machines on my LAN are on or off
row 7 is an indicator on packets lost on the wide area network connection
rows 8 and 9 are the buttons to toggle pager and performance meter
the user *does not* see a system load graph, by default, but *does* see
the current date & time in the lower right hand corner of his/her
screen, by default.
As you see, I agree with the need to have date and time. I never liked
xload graphs, but do like to keep info on things like CPU load, network
traffic etc. in numeric form, and I use procmeter3 for that (my
performance meter FvwmButtons is a list of 17 items with the most useful
at bottom ... so they show up even if the top ones are hidden behind the
pager.
Concerning icons of "closed" applications, I make little use of them, they
go on bottom right (sort of), may be hidden by the pager and performance
meters (that's why these are toggleable).
After all screens have a finite size :-)
As you can see fvwm is *completely* customizable (alas, at the expense of
a learning curve, but fully worthwhile for me)
--
Lucio Chiappetti - INAF/IASF - via Corti 12 - I-20133 Milano (Italy)
For more info : http://www.iasf-milano.inaf.it/~lucio/personal.html
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"All that is google does not glitter
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