Very minimalist:
No xdm -- I login and type 'startx&;logout'.
Just twm -- it's simple & gets the job done. Multiple desktops might
be nice; I've looked at vtwm, ctwm, and tvtwm at one time or another,
but never gotten any of them working to the point of usability.
My .xinitrc does xsetroot -solid black (I've played with grey15 at times),
tweaks mouse parameters, makes caps-lock a control key, then starts:
* xclock (analog, since that's more useful than digital for estimating
angle-between-hands to answer questions like "how long do I have before
I have to stop leave here for a 2:50pm meeting")
* xbatt (for laptops)
* xmeter (must be compiled from ancient K&R-C source, but it's still
less-unnice than any other cpu-load-monitoring program I've seen)
* 4 open xterms
* a dozen more xterms pre-iconified,
* and finally twm itself
That's it. No desktop managers, no other bloatware started by default
(although I do confess to having firefox (with adblock+noscript) on a
twm left-button menu). I have lots of other software installed, but I
start it by typing (eg) "openoffice&" from a shell prompt (tcsh).
I don't like flashy colors. My typical xterm is
xterm -g 80x38+0-0 -bw 4 -fn 7x14 -fg white -bg black -j -rw +s -sl 2000 +sb
-si -sk +sf -wf -cm &
i.e. the background is black, letters & frame are white. Right now as
I'm typing this, the only pixels on my screen which aren't black or white
are those in xbatt's battery icon.
I've used this same desktop layout since c.1986 on various Suns, SGIs,
Linux boxen, and various OpenBSDs. One day around 1993, at an institution
which was all SGI desktops (running Irix), my boss walked into my office
to talk to one of my officemates. My screen had my usual layout plus
a gnuplot window displaying a graph in gnuplot's default first-plot color
(red). My boss glanced at the screen, and said (deadpan)
"Jonathan, your monitor's broken."
I though that was very funny...
--
-- "Jonathan Thornburg [remove -animal to reply]"
<jth...@astro.indiana-zebra.edu>
Dept of Astronomy, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, USA
"Only one carry on? No electronics for the first hour of flight?
I wish that, just once, some terrorist would try something that
you can only foil by upgrading the passengers to first class and
giving them free drinks." -- Bruce Schneier
