On 29/10/19 7:43 pm, Walter Alejandro Iglesias wrote: > Another long term fvwm2 user here. > > I move my hands off the keyboard (to reach arrows, Pg*, Home, End, keys > or the mouse) only when I'm forced to. That's why the first feature I > test in a window manager is its switch focus behavior from keyboard. I > usually bind this function to the popular Alt-Tab. > > I tested and used lots of window managers for X, the only one that let > me do what I want is fvwm2, this is why I've got stuck with it (13 > years ago and still counting) even when I don't agree with the insanity > that means to have to learn a whole programming language to configure a > window manager.
This seems to be a recurring theme. I was a long-time KDE user, until about version 4… V3 was usable on the PII 300MHz laptop I was using for uni studies at the time (yes, in 2006-2008 I was poor). Notably, I was using its multi-key key binding features so that common operations could be performed using combinations of keys hit in sequence. I was able to move windows around, switch applications, launch applications, etc, without having to resort to using the "joystick mouse" that the laptop featured, and could do it one-handed whilst on the move back when the battery was working. KDE4 broke that… coupled with bloated memory requirements which soon filled the 160MB of RAM (which was all the SD-RAM my laptop could take), soon had me on the move. FVWM2 was the only one that could pull off such flexibility -- and in the end, could do it far better. Biggest gripe today is the removal of `FVWMTaskBar`, which so far I've gotten `fbpanel` to largely replace (and in some ways, its systray integration is better), but I'm not completely happy with this: with current FVWM it seems to have problems positioning itself at the top-border of the screen, and on the Raspberry Pi 3, I've seen it chew significant CPU cycles, and configuring it is a pain. I'm experimenting with Fluxbox at the moment on the Pi, not sure if it has the keyboard handling functionality that FVWM2 does yet. Others have raised concerns about the license of FVWM2 (GPLv2), which is I understand a contributing factor as to why it's not in base. So I guess this is the question… what features of FVWM2 are we aiming for and what would an "ideal" window manager for OpenBSD look like? - Flexible input binding handling: FVWM2 supports combination of keyboard and mouse bindings, including gestures -- it'd be worth trying to mimic as much of this functionality as possible. - Scripting: FVWM2 has its own scripting language, do we use that approach, or maybe embed another, if so what? Perl5 perhaps (since that's in base)? - Presumably this would be BSD licensed? Or maybe MIT? - Do we care what it "looks" like? (I have FVWM2 to more-or-less look like MWM.) - What UI library is preferred here? Not a fan of GTK+ myself, I'm more familiar with Qt. FVWM2 uses libxcb. Regards, -- Stuart Longland (aka Redhatter, VK4MSL) I haven't lost my mind... ...it's backed up on a tape somewhere.
