On Sun, Feb 25, 2001 at 12:45:34PM +1100, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> <quote who="Paul Cameron">
> > I like having all of the screen to myself, and minimising distractions.
> > For me, distractions are fancy window decorations, sound effects
> > whenever I so much as look at my wm, image background. fvwm doesn't
> > require much configuration to give that to me.
> >
> > To each their own. "That's very pretty, now give me a fucking xterm"
I switched to sawfish from wmx, and consider myself a
"minimalist window manager" kind of guy. I stopped using
fvwm several years ago because maintaining the gargantuan
configuration file was getting me down. And I didn't like the
motif-esque window style, but that's a style isssue, and you
can't legislate that, can you...
With both wmx and my current sawfish config, xterm is at the top
of the right-mouse-root menu, so takes almost no effort at all.
You can (and I did) run sawfish without the rest of gnome, or
the space-sapping pannel. I am running it now though, to see if
it's useful. I'm not convinced, but it doesn't get in the way
too much when I have it on the right hand side of the screen,
with my rclock and xload applications docked into it. I still
don't run the gmc desktop file manager thingy, although I did
run kfm under wmx for a while.
> Ah, so that's it.
>
> See, now you have no excuse to be using fvwm. ;) I've mentioned it before:
> Use lwm. It's beautifully small. [ See sig. ]
The thing that I particularly like about sawfish is that the
configuration is in scheme scripts. Dig my current .sawfishrc:
(require 'sawmill-defaults)
(setq apps-menu '(
("xterm" (system "xterm &"))
("Mail-Mutt" (system "~/.wmx/Mail/Mutt &"))
("Mail-Mozilla" (system "~/.wmx/Mail/Mozilla &"))
("Mail-TKRat" (system "~/.wmx/Mail/TKRat &"))
("News" (system "~/.wmx/News &"))
("Notes" (system "~/.wmx/Notes &"))
()
("Netscape" (system "netscape &"))
("Galeon" (system "galeon &"))
("Mozilla" (system "mozilla &"))
()
("Address Book" (system "xmaddressbook &"))
("Emacs" (system "gnuclient &"))
("StarOffice" (system "~/.wmx/StarOffice &"))
("VNC" (system "vncviewer &"))
("GV" (system "ggv &"))
("XMMS" (system "~/.wmx/XMMS &"))
("xcalc" (system "xcalc &")))
)
Yes: Most of my sawfish config still uses my wmx config, which
was the best thing since sliced bread. I'm fairly confident
that if I expended a few brain cycles, it wouldn't be hard to
write a sawfish apps-menu that actually read this stuff out of
the .wmx directory, and created it on the fly, for full wmx
compatability.
I stopped using wmx because (a) it was a little unstable, and
would do odd things from time to time, and (b) the neat-looking
shaped windows were really quite slow, in spite of the
minimalist, flat decoration.
Re lwm: I haven't used it, but sawfish doesn't have icons or
button bars, or icon docks either. It does have root menus. I
can't imagine why you'd want to live without them, and am not
sure why you would necessarily want to run _another_ program to
get them. (The NCD X-Terminals that I used in about '90 had a
built-in WM without a root menu. That made sense, because the
root menu typically wants to run applications, and that's a good
deal harder from the context of an X-Terminal. That doesn't
really apply in the normal workstation environment though.)
I find that I really _like_ that sawfish can configure most of
the sorts of things that you normally have to stuff around with
config files for with a nice GUI thing, and has really good
support for keyboard control.
Wow: that bit of sawfish advocacy certainly seemes to have
become a bit of a rant. Sorry. I've been wasting time tweaking
window managers since about '87 or '88, and with sawfish I
almost think that that's behind me.
--
Andrew
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