Back to the Future -- fvwm (Shallow Thoughts)

Back to the Future -- fvwm

I've been alternating between icewm and openbox for my window manager, but I'm not entirely happy with either one. They're both fast to start up, which is important to me, but I've had frustrations mostly relating to window focus -- which window becomes focused when switching from one desktop to another (icewm's biggest problem) or when a window resizes (openbox), and also with initial window positioning and desktop location (e.g. making one window span all desktops without having to select a menu item every time I run that app).

Someone was opining on IRC about fvwm and its wonderful configurability, and that made me realize that I haven't really given fvwm a chance in a long, long time. Time to see if I was missing anything!

The defaults are terrible. No wonder I didn't stick with fvwm after newer windowmanagers came out! It's definitely not an install-and-go sort of program. Nor is the documentation (a long and seemingly thorough man page) clear on how to get started configuring it.

Eventually I figured out that it looks for ~/.fvwm/config, and that some sample configs were in /usr/share/doc/fvwm/sample.fvwmrc (which is a directory), and I went from there. After several hours of hacking, googling, and asking questions on #fvwm, I had a setup which rivals any window manager I've found: it's fast, lets me configure the look of my windows, lets me bind just about anything to keys, and seems pretty well behaved focus behavior. More important, it also allows me to specify special behavior for certain windows, for example, making xchat always occupy all desktops:

Style "xchat"    Sticky

which is something I've wanted but haven't been able to do in any other lightweight window manager. That alone may keep me in fvwm for the forseeable future.

Tips for things that were non-obvious:

Rotating through three desktops

In other window managers, I define three desktops, and use ctrl-alt-right and left to cycle through them, rotating, so going right from 3 goes to desktop 1. fvwm has both "pages" (a virtual desktop can be bigger than the screen, and mousing off the right side scrolls right one page) and desktops. I didn't want pages, only desktops, so DeskTopSize 1x1 turns off the pages, and it was clear from the man page that

PointerKey Left        A CM     GotoDesk -1

would go left one desk (the only unclear part about that is that A in the modifier list means "Any", not "Alt", and "M" (presumably for "meta" means alt, not the windows-key which some programs use for meta). "PointerKey" is needed instead of "Key" because otherwise fvwm gets confused when using the "sloppy focus" model (the man page warns about that).

The question was, how to limit fvwm to three desktops, and wrap around, rather than just going left to new desktops forever? The answer (courtesy of someone on IRC) turned out to be:

PointerKey Left        A CM     GotoDesk -1 0 2
PointerKey Right       A CM     GotoDesk 1 0 2
PointerKey Left        A CMS    MoveToDesk -1 0 2
PointerKey Right       A CMS    MoveToDesk 1 0 2

The only problem at this point is that MoveToDesk doesn't then change to the new desktop, the way other window managers do, but I'm confident that will be easily solved.

Titlebar buttons

I had the hardest time getting buttons (e.g. maximize, close) to appear on the titlebars of my windows. You'd think this would happen by default, but it doesn't. It turned out that titlebar buttons aren't drawn unless there's a key or mouse action bound to that button, which they aren't by default. So to get buttons for window menu, maximize, and close, I had to do:

Mouse 1 6       A       Close
Mouse 1 8       A       Maximize
Mouse 1 1       A       Menu Window-Ops Nop

But then showing buttons 6 and 8 (the even buttons are numbered from the top right) automatically turns on 2 and 4 (I chose 6 and 8 because their default shapes were vaguely mnemonic), so they have to be turned off again:

Style * NoButton 2
Style * NoButton 4

Smaller titlebar and window frame

I also wanted to reduce the titlebar height and the width of the window frame: I don't like wasting all that screen real estate. That, too, took a long time to figure out. It turns out I had to define my own theme in order to do that, then add a couple of undocumented items to my theme. There's lots of documentation around on how to make buttons and background images and menus and key bindings in themes, but none of the documentation mentions simple stuff like titlebar height.

DestroyDecor MyDecor
AddToDecor   MyDecor
+ TitleStyle Height 16
+ Style "*"       BorderWidth 5, HandleWidth 5
+ ButtonStyle All -- UseTitleStyle
Style "*" UseDecor MyDecor

New windows should grab focus

Most window managers do this by default, but fvwm doesn't, and requires: Style * FPGrabFocus

Full config file

For any other settings, see my fvwm config file.

Tags: linux, X11, window managers
[ 18:14 Dec 13, 2004    More linux | permalink to this entry | ]