More info about moving on: I have succesfully replaced ctwm on my home machine with a combination of OpenBox and BBPager (at work I still use ctwm but I think that's about to change, too many bugs, it's getting annoying). OpenBox is simpler, but has all the features I had been using in Ctwm, even the ones I hacked in (i.e. SaveWorkspaceFocus), and none of the bugs, a lean XML configuration file, and straightforward behavior made the transition possible (I'm very difficult and intolerant of cr*p configuration and dependencies-- openbox has neither).
This email is mostly for what follows: for the others who have made the switch, if you're missing the workspacemgr, you can use "bbpager" along with the following script to toggle it: pager-toggle: #!/bin/sh # Toggle a pager process running. PAGER=bbpager PAGEROPTS="-config $CONF/common/etc/openbox/blackboxrc" if pgrep -x $PAGER >/dev/null ; then pkill -x $PAGER >/dev/null else $PAGER $PAGEROPTS >/dev/null & fi In my openbox.xml config file, I bind Super-Tab to it: <keybind key="W-Tab"> <action name="Execute"> <execute>~/p/conf/common/bin/pager-toggle</execute> </action> </keybind> It's a bit of a hack, but it works well (apart from the occasional lag to start it), and behaves like what I had under ctwm, i.e., when I press Super-Tab, I get a large workspacemgr to move my windows to any desktop I like. I pressed again to hide it. Note that you may want to set the geometry of the pager in .blackboxrc. I'm going to try to live with it for a while longer (it's not my first attempt at switching away, ctwm is like an old girlfriend that just keeps coming back), but after a month already it feels like home. cheers,