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My FVWM configuration files
_ _ __ __ __ __ _ | | ___ ___| |__ | \/ | \/ ( )___ _ | |/ _ \/ __| '_ \| |\/| | |\/| |// __| | |_| | (_) \__ \ | | | | | | | | | \__ \ \___/ \___/|___/_| |_|_| |_|_| |_| |___/ (terrible and outdated) _______ ____ ____ __ | ___\ \ / /\ \ / / \/ | | |_ \ \ / / \ \ /\ / /| |\/| | | _| \ V / \ V V / | | | | |_| \_/ \_/\_/ |_| |_| __ ___ ___ _ __ / _| / __/ _ \| '_ \| |_ | (_| (_) | | | | _| \___\___/|_| |_|_| This was my old config file for the F(?) Virtual Window Manager, which was my primary window manager in Debian for most of my college years. I used FVWM from sometime around or before 2009 to 2013, around which point I switched to using Sawfish, another highly extensible window manager. This repository is stored here mostly for historical interest, as a kind of a personal time capsule. This README will briefly describe how I got into FVWM, things I liked and disliked about it, and just some oddities I implemented here using FVWM's configuration pseudo-language (which only becomes Turing complete due to its "PipeRead" directive). How I got started with FVWM --------------------------- I can't remember the original impetus for me wanting to switch window managers, which I assume I was probably using GNOME on Debian Squeeze. I had been using GNU Emacs for a long time already and probably got to thinking "Man, I wish I had this extensibility for my desktop". Either that or I googled "best unix hacker window manager" out of some egotistical need to prove to myself that I had some respectable level of CS street-cred at Berkeley. In retrospect, this was more-or-less pointless as I basically didn't talk to other CS students out of my own social ineptitude at the time. I think only time did another guy notice my WM config in the basement of Soda Hall and strike up a conversation about it. Anyway, I ended up finding IronPhoenix's awesome webpage detailing her quest for the perfect window manager. (http://ironphoenix.org/fvwm/) It's a great read. Read it if you can. It's got screenshots and everything, not like this repo. I think it really sold me on the configurability of FVWM, and the creativity one can have when they're allowed to twiddle and tweak things in an open-sandbox like way. It was software that allowed you to have your own vision outside of whatever the original author might even imagine someone wanting. There's a lot of open-source free/libre software that are *theoretically* free in that, yes, you can recompile software to change stuff. But they don't make it easy. The friction's too high for any real user-freedom to take place. Yeah, you "could" make GNOME have wonky key bindings, window styles and placements, panels or whatever, but you *won't* because it's not designed to let you. It's like GNOME was a coloring book whereas FVWM was a piece of paper. GNOME will generally look better (and my FVWM was *UGLY*), but you can't change the outline of a dolphin into a giraffe. The other selling points of FVWM for me was I once heard it described as the "Emacs of WMs", and that it was so configurable that even the "F" in "FVWM" was configurable. (Historically, at some point people had forgotten what the "F" originally stood for. Years later people dug up that it originally stood "feeble", but at that point people just adopted the "F" as "F(?)".) Things I liked about FVWM ------------------------- Desktops/Pages Virtual desktops (or "pages" ["viewports" in Sawfish terms]) with mouse edge scrolling. You could instantly flip back and forth between pages on the same desktop by flicking your mouse over the edge. The spatial metaphor here is great. Instead of having to Alt-tab until I found the window I wanted, I just had to move my mouse "left and up" for something like Firefox (although it was still Iceweasel in Debian back then), "down" for Emacs, and "right" for whatever graphs or output from Emacs I was working on. +-----------+-------------+ | | | | Firefox | | | | | +-----------+-------------+ | Emacs | "Output" | | + | like graphs,| | Xterm | compilation.| +-----------+-------------+ The FVWM Pager made it easy to see where things were laid out. With some scripting, different desktops could have different backgrounds (basically by calling either "feh" or "fvwm-root"), which made it easy to associate different applications with different cognitive contexts. SloppyFocus FVWM got me really liking SloppyFocus (focus follows the mouse pointer). Unlike keyboard purists I found that flicking my mouse with my touchpad was a quick and easy way to switch between windows, which I probably did a lot when I had Emacs and some xterms side by side. Panels/FVWM Buttons FVWM buttons was this weird but awesome configurable panel that was basically able to "absorb" a bunch of small windows into one large panel. I basically used it to absorb the desktop pager, a system tray (stalonetray), a clock, and a conky instance that showed stats like CPU usage, memory, internet, and so forth. I also had a Quake-console-style panel that could auto-hide that had three terminals (two were just constantly tailing some log files). Application-specific hotkeys It wasn't exactly built in, but you could easily make a hotkey to "go to your default Emacs instance on its designated desktop". And if it wasn't started (no windows matched), it would automatically start it. I had keys to automatically go to Emacs, Icedove, Pidgin, and whatever I was using to play music (probably either banshee or mpd). Configs that the community shared One thing that sticks out in my mind was that this guy "taviso" had some pretty cool FVWM snippets. I think he had stuff like iconifying windows with a screenshot as a mini thumbnail (or maybe I got that from someone else). Also I either got the code for Packing/Moving windows from a post from him or Thomas Adam. Years later when I saw lots of security vulnerabilities by Tavis Ormandy, I was like "whoah! that's the same guy who had those great FVWM snippets!". Other famous FVWM users include Donald Knuth, but I never saw any cool .fvwmrc from the guy so whatever. :P Tiling without a tiling WM Speaking of packing/moving windows. One of the great things about FVWM was that you had a stacking window manager that you could add some tiling-like hotkeys to. It was important to me to not use a tiling WM because GIMP at the time would spawn like 5 different windows of different sizes that it positioned weirdly. And there's no way that would have worked well in a strictly tiling WM. Weird things about FVWM ----------------------- The weirdest thing about FVWM is that despite its flexibility its configuration *isn't* a programming language. This kind of lead to a lot of pain points. You basically don't have FVWM-internal variables. You could set environment variables but that would start to show up in all your subprocesses you spawned. If you set variables this way, people would generally scold you on the forums. What you *could* do, though, is dynamically define or append to functions (using "AddToFunc"). I abused the hell out of this. I had functions that created functions to show or hide windows by application class or window id. I had a function called "MakeWeirdFunc" (because I suck at names and it *is* weird) that made it possibly to dynamically add hotkeys to specific windows (like quickly pulling up a specific Emacs frame, no matter which desktop or page you were on). This was written in something that wasn't a "functional language" both in the sense functions aren't values (and I don't think functions even *return* anything, they just execute statements) and in the sense that it isn't really a programming language. Any time you had to do stuff like add screen coordinates, you had to use "PipeRead" to calculate it with some bash one-liner or a shell script. Other miscellaneous stuff in my FVWM config ------- Animated edge scrolling. Normally flipping edges is done instantaneously. This disorients a lot of people, so I added some functions to "scroll" along the side so they'd understand what's going on. Normally I wouldn't use it though because it was slow. Hotkeys to bring a menu to read the clipboard using espeak text-to-speech. I basically used this to read Kafka's Metamorphosis sometime in 2010. Some tiling-like capabilities. Random transparency hotkey stuff. Nothing special. Everyone was doing it to look cool at the time though. Moving away from FVWM --------------------- At some point for some reason I started using Sawfish. I always saw comparisons between FVWM and Sawfish as being the two most extensible window managers. I don't remember exactly when or why I started using Sawfish. Maybe I had upgraded my laptop and was trying something new. Maybe the fear of using environment variables in FVWM was getting to me. But eventually, sometime near the end of college I tried Sawfish and basically instantly loved it. Probably the nicest thing was actually being able to use variables without being shamed for polluting the environment variables. You could store not just global variables but window-specific variables as well. Documentation for Sawfish was actually incredibly good, too, being laid out in two "info" manuals (one for librep [Sawfish's lisp language] and one for Sawfish itself). FVWM's documentation was mostly really long man pages that were a bit unwieldly for me to navigate. Both were great in that they had REPLs (which is super important for easy extensibility), but Sawfish had the advantage of being better integrated into Emacs. I think I kept using FVWM and Sawfish interchangeably for a while. If you look in my dot-sawfish repository, you'll notice that the links to all the wallpapers are still in my "~/.fvwm/wallpaper/". :) That being said, FVWM is still a great window manager, and I miss my old config from time to time. I wish I made it more portable instead of using absolute paths to files outside the repository. (Mostly shell scripts.) FVWM's desktop pager was a lot more configurable (I believe) than Sawfish's was. FvwmButtons is something that I've *never* found anywhere else, and I find I occasionally miss my Quake console. FVWM taught me a lot about the value and joy of user-accessible extensibility. If you give your users building blocks instead of just twisty-knobs, they can make really cool things. Would I recommend FVWM today? Yeah, I think so. Since we're not all Wayland yet, you might as well have a nice personalized X Window Manager. Considering that most computer time is spent in a WM, it might as well be cozy, comfortable, and ergonomic. And FVWM is a great and incredibly easy way to get started in that. FVWM I think still far outweighs Sawfish in terms of popularity, despite the latter actually having been the official GNOME WM for a short while. Maybe the fact that it's not using a full-fledged lisp is actually one of its biggest features. You don't think "oh, I'm not a programmer I can't use this", you think "Oh, it's just a text config, this is easy". And then gradually as your config changes over time you realize... you never needed to *be* a "programmer", you were programming all along! (Written 2020.Jan.24)
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