On Mon 26 Feb 2018 at 20:24:28 (+0100), Thomas Schmitt wrote: > Hi, > > Richard Owlett wrote: > > Without *ANY* customization, how much more can fvwm do for me? > > Without any customization by anybody it is quite useless.
Lest this give the wrong impression to someone coming across this post, it's a bit harsh, and would assume that you'd done nothing with ~/.xsession either. I hid my ~/.fvwm and restarted fvwm to take a look at the default configuration. You seem to get 2x2 desks each with 2x2 viewports, its pager at top right (underneath my clock as it happened), with a window selector down the right margin. The root window had a well- populated menu of applications and utilities. Because I don't use desks but a 5x4 set of viewports, I was limited in what I could reach as three of the desks are empty. Restoring .fvwm and restarting fvwm brought everything back to usual. When I ran startx with no .fvwm, everything in my .xsession started normally except that many of the xterms were stacked on top of each other because they were all trapped in a 2x2 desk instead of 5x4. (Restoring my .fvwm and restarting would still involve dragging a lot of xterms to their proper places; I didn't bother, but went back to startx.) > With reasonable customization by an initial ~/.fvwm2rc and some additions > by myself, it does for me: > > - Add handles to the windows so i can move, resize, iconify them, and > make them "sticky" to the glass of the screen. > > - Define meaning of mouse buttons. The left one certainly worked in the root window. > - Set background and create a first xterm after startup of the X Window > System. My dynamic background colours were functioning. Everything in .xsession started normally. > - Provide FvwmPager by which i switch between the 8 pages of my > virtual desktop. As I said, a pager was there (obviously lacking my usual buttons). > - Install FvwmButtons panel with FvwmPager, xclock, "Fvwm2" button with > a master menu (very rarely used by me), and a button that creates > xterms with bash sessions (often used). > > - Define and perform my private definition of the MS-Windows keys > of my keybard: > Key Super_L A N RaiseLower > Key Super_R A N RaiseLower > > - Refrain from annoying me with xterm icons with fully active shell dialog: > Style "XTerm" IconOverride > Style "XTerm" Icon display.xpm > > The rest of graphical programs is started by shell comands in xterms: > Web browser, PDF reader, own programs ... Again, a populated root menu is there. Just to give an indication of fvwm's stability, my ~/.fvwm/config is dated 2002-04-08. It has 9 hooks: I use init-restart and post (my main configuration) but I also read "last-post" hook in the latter. Both init-restart amd last-post are symlinks to -$HOSTNAME-$[screen] variants, though I haven't used a second $[screen] since retiring. Back then, the screens were on separate VDUs differing in size and resolution. Not xinerama: only the mouse could move between them. But I've always been accustomed to just one desk per screen. Going back even further, I remember running X with three resolutions configured (CtrlAlt+ and CtrlAlt- rotated through the alternatives). I think this is why I always called fvwm's viewports (as above) by the term "pages", which is also used by xterm. To me, at that time, a viewport was the part of the root window you could see at any time, and it slid around when you moved the mouse against the edge, like sliding a large placemat on a tray. Viewports in this sense were the bread and butter of graphics systems like eg GINO. Cheers, David.
