Re: [gentoo-user] [OT] In search of a "good" windowmanager

[John H. Moe]

Lars Gustäbel wrote: On Sat, Sep 12, 2009 at 03:40:56PM +0200, meino.cra...@gmx.de wrote: I would like to hear from others what experiences they made with what windowmanagers. Hi! I've been using fvwm2 (http://fvwm.org) for years now and am quite happy with it. Although it may look old and strange at first (the default settings are rather horrible IIRC), it is possible to configure every tiny detail of it using config files. I am still sometimes amazed of what you can do with it. The fvwm manpage has everything you need to know. The complexity is also its main drawback: it took me several weeks to have it the way I wanted it. fvwm is indeed rather complicated at first but that's why it's so powerful. It is really flexible and you can still use all the little gui tools out there from other window managers. One cool feature of fvwm is that you can assign different window styles based on the application, e.g. I have a graphical system monitor on my third desktop, that is started when I log in via .xinitrc and always stays on bottom, never gets the focus and does not appear in the window list or on the task bar, so it does not interfere with the rest of the system at all. Before using fvwm2 I used KDE which had too much stuff I didn't really need. (However, I am still using the KDE kicker panel with fvwm, which I think is quite funny.) When I looked for a new window manager I tried fluxbox for a few days, but it did not convince me. Then I tried fvwm and stayed with it. Regards, Vote #2 for FVWM. It does nothing (or at least, an absolute minimum) by default you can configure it to be just about whatever you want man pages explicitly say it can be used mouse-less, and I'm like you: I grew up with old, command-line systems and am still more comfortable with that  :-P  so I've configured most mouse bindings to keys as well Support for extras via FVWM Modules, so that the core system itself stays small.  If you want to add a desktop pager, add the FVWMPager module.  If you want a taskbar, add the FVWMTaskBar module.  Even a popup banner at startup with FVWMBanner, if you're in to that sort of thing..  :-P However, as previous poster pointed out, all this configurability is also a bit of a drawback, in that there are a LOT of configuration items to trawl through to find what you want. But most things I've wanted to do I've been able to find an example of on the FVWM forums, which are quite helpful. From what I've read, you can also use FVWM-Themes to try and get a jump start with some possible configs, but I've never used them, so I can't comment on their worth or helpfulness HTH John Moe