One of the changes I made at the start of the 2006 calender year, is dropping Enlightenment E16 in favor of Fvwm on my laptop. (On my desktop I still run E16.)

Fvwm is one of the most configurable and most powerful window-managers for the X Windowing system. Unlike many of the other window-managers, the configuration for Fvwm is completely text-based. Of course, it is possible to find pre-defined themes for Fvwm (I highly recommend fvwm-crystal for example); but that is not something I had in mind. I decided to start using Fvwm because I want an extremely clean and customizable interface, and because I really enjoyed customizing mutt, my mail client of choice.

Below I document my on-going learning experience and the configuration file it produced.

The Actual Files

A note to start: I take the modular configuration approach. The file config.fvwm2rc is what most people label .fvwm2rc.

• fvwm2rc, the main config file.
• Menus.fvwm2rc, menu configurations.
• BackgroundAndColours.fvwm2rc, desktop background configuration, and definition for colorsets.
• MouseKeyboardConfig.fvwm2rc, mouse button actions, gestures, and keyboard bindings.

As it stands now, it is not very exciting: I haven't got true transparencies working with the version of X.org running on my laptop, so I use aterm with pseudo-transparency and shading. But it already looks good enough to use.

A notes:

• Layout: I use a 3 desktop, 3 horizontal page layout. I allow continuous scrolling of pages within the desktop using the EdgeScroll command.
• DropTerm is a sticky instance of aterm that models after the console of FPS games like Quake. It is shaded normally: it drops down from the top edge of the screen when the cursor touches the top edge or when the user hits the hotkey (F12 is what I defined it to be).
• Sticky stuff. Besides DropTerm, there are two other sticky windows: xclock on the upper left corner and xload on the upper right corner.
• RecenterWindow: I defined a function called RecenterWindow (turns out to be mighty useful later on) to center an active window on the screen (or do the best to achieve so). This is because the ordinary WarpToWindow command would not display an active screen across page boundary, so windows that sits on the page-boundary won't be shown in its entirety.
• FvwmPager with background that matches the real background. The generation of the background xpm files are automatic.
• Program Selector. This is an FvwmScript that I hacked together. It is meant to emulate some functionality of the Mac OS X expose. It is a hack job, and is slow, but it does what I want it to do. Basically the script lists all unshaded user windows, takes a snapshot of every one of them, and displays them for selection. It complements FvwmPager in that, with the pager, I can find windows based on location; with the Program Selector, I can locate lost windows based on a screenshot of it. It is rather handy when one has a dozen terminal emulators floating around. (Yes, the name is kind of dumb. I'll look for a better one later.) The code for the script is here.

Screenshots

What window-manager preview would be complete without screenshots?

Clock on the left, histogram of computer load on the right. Terminals show pseudotransparency. The Program Selector in action. Notice that it multiple tabs in one firefox window shows up as one entry, whereas separate windows gets separte entries. And that xmms managed to get one for the player and one for the playlist.