Thanks to the people who have continued commenting on this, possibly
because they had not yet got to my message saying I had by-passed the
problem by abandoning title-bars in ctwm, and adding extra functionaliy
using function keys.
That decision now works well on a relatively small laptop screen
(resolution 1366x768) and gives me more space for useful items.
Tina wrote:
> I've found that adding a BorderColor for the active window also helps
> with identifying them:
>
> Color {
> BorderColor "#ff0000" {
> "WorkSpaceManager" "#ffff00"
> "TWM Icon Manager" "#ffff00"
> }
> }
Regarding the above tip to highlight borders of the active window: I had
already found before abandoning window titles that setting different
BorderColor and BorderTileBackground achieves that, and I agree that it's
useful! It also highights the name of the current window in the
Icon manager.
Perhaps I've misunderstood the proposal.
As reported previously, I've compensated for lack of title bars by
providing more function key actions. One decision I previously reported was
using F10 (now changed to F4 because of an unnoticed clash) to delete the
current window.
I later decided that just a function key is is too risky, e.g. if I hit F4
instead of F3 by mistake, ...
So "delete window" now requires a modifier key + F3.
The modifier is CTRL for now, partly because there are CTRL buttons on
both sides of the keyboard -- though I always swap the left CTRL with
CapsLock, which is used much less often.
[I grew up with CTRL in the middle (next to "A") on Sun Workstations... and
other keyboards designed before IBM PCs, or whatever, screwed things up by
putting CTRL in the wrong place. Presumably they thought the majority of
users would be using computers as text processors and would need upper case
more often than CTRL.]
I had also tried the suggestion of recompiling ctwm from source on the
laptop, but it made no difference to the size of titlebars.
Likewise, copying the ctwm executable from my desktop PC, where I don't
have expanded titlebars, did not help.
The new Ctwm configuration without title bars seems to work well though
bits of my brain controlling my finger-tips need some re-programming, which
will take a little while.
One unexpected consequence is: on the laptop firefox now detects the lack
of a title bar and conveniently adds three new symbols on top right on the
laptop:
underscore -> minimise (has to be retrieved from iconmanager)
box -> toggle between maximise and minimise.
(Symbol becomes smaller when window is maximised,)
cross -> delete window
Opera tries to do something similar, but doesn't show its name in the
iocnmanager.
I may later try living without title bars also on my desktop screen (1920x1080).
Thanks again to all...
Aaron
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs
