I just decided to try to make my fvwm setup more friendly.
I installed the most recent stable fvwm and started using
the Icon Manager. However, when I click on it nothing happens
so it isn’t very useful – that is it doesn’t make windows iconify or do anything
for that matter, it just lists them. I suspect it is something obvious but I couldn’t
find any information that might help me track it down.
WinList, on the other hand, works fine and can iconify/de-iconfiy etc…
and I haven’t had any trouble with other applications.
I tried commenting out the entire setup below and restarting but that didn’t help.
However, I include it here anyway. I should also mention that fvwm itself is not
restarting reliably for me. The X-server complains about a signal 11 and crashes
and I have to restart the whole thing.
I inherited the fvwm set-up from elsewhere. I presume it is a redundant style that lost favour at some point but it does work just fine. In particular, the configuration options work if I do it the proper way (as you described) or the way the .fvwm2rc I have now does it
with all the asterisks.
What doesn’t work is mouse clicks on IconMan. Regardless of what I do it doesn’t respond when I click on it so I can’t use it to manage my windows. It just provides an inert list of them. All other module applications respond to mouse clicks just fine, including WinList. WinList is uglier, ignores my font directives and wont restrict itself to just windows on the current page so I prefer IconMan. I commonly accumulate 100 or more windows on 9 pages after a month or so, so I need to be able to manage them on a page-by-page basis.
I don’t know if it is related, but I also have the problem I mentioned that restarting fvwm2 doesn’t work. The X-server quits instead and tells me it recieved a signal 11.
Yup, except that the “old” way might change at some point – so if you find it stops working, you know how to fix it now.
That’s interesting. If we take the old way of doing things, then:
*FvwmIconMan: *Action Mouse 3 A sendcommand "Menu FvwmMenuWindowOps Nop"
Instructs FvwmIconMan to launch the specified menu when button three is pressed. So in that way, you can do anything you like. At least, using the above construct works for me, on Fvwm-2.5.12 – and it doesn’t have to be a menu you call up, it could call a function, for instance.
OK, so that will core dump – I don’t know how you have things setup, but is a core file produced? If it is, I’d like to see a backtrace of it:
$ gdb fvwm core
(gdb) where
And the output from that would help. It might be related, I suppose. In addition to that, you’ll have to ensure that your shell allows for corefiles to be created. If you’re using any Bourne-shell derivative, then:
ulimit -c 9000
Or something like it, before you launch fvwm, should suffice – typically, you’ll find the core file in your $HOME directory.
I traced this to using xv to set the background image in the root window. xv somehow managed to generate a signal 11 when it does this on a restart (but not when its first started). I am using xpmroot now and its fine.
I never managed to get FvwmIconMan to respond to mouse clicks.
I just gave up on it, converted all my pages to desktops and I’m using FvwmWinList instead. FvwmWinList expands to show wide names for every window and I use FvwmAuto to only raise WinList when I am looking at it (focus) and otherwise lower it to the back (and do nothing for other windows). I am now living Icon free just using WinList to restore minimized windows and liking it a lot. I have been tweaking various apps to make long informative window titles to assist me here. It would be nice to sort the windows in the list by class etc…
