How do you setup your desktop? Which are the (lightweight) applications you use in combination with FVWM?
I would like to have some opinions about what makes a good desktop combination.
Look at other people’s configs for that. There’s an entire section devoted to it. Not to mention several other threads about specific apps.
Since I have hundreds of them open, I use ‘rxvt’ to save on memory.
mc, emelfm, gentoo, xftree3, etc.
MPD with ncmpc/mpc
ELinks.
feh.
Loathingly use bitlbee when I have to. It’s IRC for me all the way, hence irssi.
cdrecord in a terminal window, of course.
– Thomas Adam
Does somebody knows a good console msn-client, like irssi for irc?
Did you somehow miss my mentioning ‘bitlbee’? Look also at ‘centericq’.
– Thomas Adam
urxvt
rox
xmms/xine
firefox
gimp
xchat
graveman
scite
xterm
zsh or nautilus (but I wouldn’t call the latter ‘lightweight’)
mpc for music, xine for video
Firefox or links (mainly for viewing the Java API documentation)
GThumb/Gimp
Gaim and Irssi (sometimes using Bitlbee)
Don’t actually use one, but if I do it’s mosttimes k3b as it’s the easiest one for (very) sporadic use.
[EDIT]Of course, editor: emacs, with fvwm-mode of course! 
urxvt
thunar
pygmy
firefox
mirage/gimp
gaim/xchat
Xterm
Xterm again 
XMMS/mplayer
Firefox
qiv/gimp
Gaim
cdrecord or, recently, K3B
aterm or rxvt
mc, konqueror, occasionaly nautilus
music: mpd+mpc+ncmpc/gmpc
video: mplayer, vlc, xine
firefox on my main computer, dillo on an old laptop, links if I need internet on the console
gthumb but I’m still looking for something else. gimmage looks promising though. f-spot mayby?
amsn, despite the anoying bugs
k3b although it’s so slow to start… any lightweight gui tools available?
editor: mc, nano, bluefish
systemmonitoring: xosview, top, ‘ps ax’, netstat,conky,…
ftpclient: gftp, ftp
remote desktop: tightvnc,freenx
virtualization: vmware
scientific graphics: gnuplot, ImageJ
other graphics: gimp, sodipodi, inkscape
desktop publishing: scribus
…
mrxvt
rox
xmms/mplayer
firefox
imagemagick/gimp
amsn-cvs (no boring bugs)
graveman
you forgot two important things:
editor: vi
shell: bash
morbusg, what is your hardware?
Err… P4 2Ghz /w 1Gb memory & PPC 1.25Ghz (orsomething) /w 512Mb memory. Why?
I keep things slight-light… My main machine is a Intel® Pentium® 4 CPU 2.66GHz w/ 1024 MB of RAM, so no need to be light-weight.
Terminal: mrxvt (I love tabs)
File Manager: Nautilus/ROX/xfe, but mostly just ls/cp/rm/mv
Music Player: mpd or beep
Movie Player: mostly xine, but vlc for mkv fansubs (they are buggy in xine, I watch a ton of fansubbs anime…)
Web Browser: Firefox (again i love tabs) Opera
Image Viewer: feh/Nautilus (I really use nautilus for image browsing than real file management)
Image Editor: gimp
Instant Messageing: gaim (again, tabs = yay)
CD Burner: k3b (I wish there was a good gtk one)
Editor: gedit and nano about 50/50 (gedit = tabs & gtk)
Shell: bash
I heavily favor gtk apps (for a unified window appearence, I currrently use the gtk Milk theme, I want to make a dark mod of it) and apps with tabs, I like to have many douments open but I hate a cluttered taskbar. If only openoffice started supporting tabs… Not that it really matters… I avoid rtf and use plantest as much as possible (I even type up papers in gedit and copy paste into OO for formatting, gedit has spell check and that’s all I need)
terminal?
rxvt-unicode
file manager?
Mostly the shell, sometimes Nautilus
music/video player?
xmms & xine + xine-ui
web browser?
opera
image viewer/editor?
gqview
instant messaging?
gaim
cd burner?
Nautilus
editor
emacs
XFCE’s Terminal
cd and ls 
mpd with gimmix or ncmpc for audio. mplayer for video.
Firefox
Gimp
Gaim (Now named Pidgin) or irssi + Bitlbee
cdrecord
xterm - It comes with X. Are others really any better? I used mrxvt for a while for it’s tabs, but then I started using screen heavily and just kind of stopped using mrxvt.
bash - I used rox for a while, but just kinda stopped using it because it was faster to use the console. Though I do like nautilus with --no-desktop, I’m not installing all of gnome just for nautilus.
mpd to serve music (actually I’m using it with icecast2 too)
mpc for binding buttons to commands to control the music
glurp for building playlists
xine & mplayer for video
Firefox for browsing the net
elinks (supports tabs) for reading documentation or remotely browsing the net
gqview (replaced ee for me when it was dropped from portage)
gimp for editing
mcabber - I only used the jabber chat in gaim, switched to mcabber because I could have it running in a screen session which I could detach and reattach from different locations
xchat - when I use IRC, never liked gaim for IRC
mkisofs - to make images
growisofs - to burn dvds
cdrecord - to burn cds
Others:
I was using gcal as a calendar, but I stopped using its appointment and note features, so now I just use that cal script someone posted not too long ago. I’ve been using claws-mail at work, pine from on campus.
That’s about it for apps that aren’t games.
[Edit: fixed a typo]
Err, of course. Xterm has some nice features (such as translations) but it’s bloated with all the textronics stuff. I use rxvt-unicode myself, with screen all the time.
My primary browser.
– Thomas Adam
Yes. Xterm is an example of bloated application.
rxvt-unicode has a much smaller memory footprint, a better ttf support, a better unicode support, nice keysyms support, and many more features that xterm has not, besides being much heavier than urxvt.
So, I can’t see how xterm is a so good app, unless you need that old stuff for a concrete purpose. The only “nice” thing about xterm, is that it is almost everywhere where there is an X server.
++ to screen.