briancarper.net (λ) (Tag: FVWM)

FVWM

Sun, 15 Mar 2009 16:11:08 -0700

A good long time ago, I was a FVWM fanatic. That time has long passed. (These days I use KDE.) But below is a dump of all the FVWM-related files I collected over time. Most of this is probably outdated and broken beyond belief, but feel free to play with it.

FVWM = bad

Thu, 06 Apr 2006 17:45:30 -0700

I briefly considered playing with FVWM again, but then I realized what a massive waste of time it is. I wish there was something like FVWM that didn't look like 90% of it was transported here from the 80's. It's really great for giving you the ability to change almost anything. The only problem is that in those few cases where you don't have the power to change, the defaults FVWM picks are horrible.

Window handles for example. Approximately 100% of the "less powerful" window managers let you graphically change the window handles and window borders. FVWM lets you either remove them, have a flat colored border, have a nasty "textured" border with a tiled pixmap (ugh) or use the most God-awful 3D-ish borders I've ever seen. If you doubt this, look at some screenshots.

You can't use a non-tiled pixmap for the borders. You can't set per-side border width. You can't do like Openbox and just keep bottom handles. This is something fundamental. Dragging a window border is something I use hundreds of time a day to resize or move windows. And window decorations are present at all times on every single window you open. It should be customizable exactly how I want it.

So my new philosophy on window managers is to pick something that has sensible defaults when it has any defaults at all, and still lets you customize what you actually give a crap about customizing. Openbox is pretty good for that.

Phew.

Tue, 21 Mar 2006 22:36:23 -0800

All done with the layout change. I'm getting good at this, it only took me one evening to do it.

I'm thinking of getting back into FVWM again. Argh. It's such a time-sink, but I feel a need to exercise my geek muscles.

FVWM stuff

Sun, 08 Jan 2006 11:15:53 -0800

You can browse my old miscellaneous FVWM stuff here.