Okay, I'm diving in!

After a pretty long journey in the Linux/BSD world (starting in about 1999), I have found my way into using fvwm. I have spent most of my Linux years using either KDE or Xfce, with more than occasional forays into more WMs than I can remember, including Openbox, Fluxbox, IceWM, Windowmaker, dwm, spectrwm (a.k.a scrotwm! :wink:), i3, and evilwm. Mostly I have used Slackware, but also currently MXLinux and FreeBSD.

I was first exposed to FVWM in Slackware, which is included with the default installation. I have always been daunted by FVWM configuration, and have therefore avoided using it. But I have seen the absolutely amazing configurations that many have created with FVWM, and marveled at their ability to do so. Especially the things that Austrumi has done with FVWM. I am admittedly pretty lazy when it comes to “ricing.”

Recently, I have been experimenting with NsCDE in Slackware. I remember the good 'ol days of CDE in UNIX. I like it very much. But knowing it was built upon FVWM left me feeling amazed once again at the mind-boggling configurativeability (is that even a word?).

So I decided to finally go to the source and figure this baby out, and build the desktop of my dreams! I will be doing a lot of documentation reading, and poring over the config files and screenshots that others have posted.

Thank you!

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My inspiration:


The story so far:

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Pretty cool looking dark theme! And brave to keep a human-readable version of their key bindings. Personally, I am lazily xmessage-ing my fvwm key file when I type Super + F1.

At the moment, I am trying to implement some of the ideas of an old one based on the CDE style: Chris’s Wiki :: blog/sysadmin/MyDesktopTour

I am also a proudly lazy ricer. Ricing consumes more time than it’s worth imho. The secret is to avoid transparent terminals like the plague, because next, you will be using pywall and you can say goodbye to your free time. Usability improvements are the only thing I am willing to spend my time on nowadays. This is why Fvwm is so good. Not only can you rice, but usability-wise, you can do pretty much anything you want too.

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