FVWM

FVWM
	Customized FVWM desktop
Developer(s)	Robert Nation
Stable release	3-1.0.4 / 20 July 2021
Repository	github.com/fvwmorg/fvwm ;
Written in	C, Perl, Unix Shell
Operating system	Unix-like
Type	Window manager
License	GNU GPL v2,; FVWM included in OpenBSD: BSD License
Website	www.fvwm.org

Last updated April 16, 2024

The F Virtual Window Manager (FVWM) is a virtual window manager for the X Window System. Originally a twm derivative, FVWM has evolved into a powerful and highly configurable environment for Unix-like systems.

History

FVWM 1.24, an old version from the 1.x series Fvwm1-wikipedia-20050312.png — FVWM 1.24, an old version from the 1.x series

In 1993, during his work analyzing acoustic signatures for the United States Department of Defense, Robert Nation began hacking twm with the intent of simultaneously reducing memory usage and adding support for virtual desktops.^[3]

Already known for his rxvt terminal emulator, Nation worked on reducing the memory consumption of his new window manager. Deciding to test FVWM's reception, on June 1, 1993, he bundled it with a rxvt release.

In 1994 Rob Nation stopped developing FVWM and made Charles Hines the maintainer. Rob Nation's last release of FVWM was fvwm-1.24r. The post-Rob Nation version of FVWM uses a different configuration file format and has a significantly different architecture. Many Linux distributions, as a result, distributed both fvwm-1.24r and later releases of FVWM as separate programs. As of 2009^[update], fvwm-1.24r still compiles and runs on a modern Linux system without any problems. A small number of users continue to use the older FVWM release. In late 1998 the office of FVWM maintainer was abolished and further development has been conducted by a group of volunteers.

Many developers have based their own projects on FVWM in order to benefit from the years of refinement and development. Many of the popular window managers in use today are related to FVWM: Afterstep, Xfce, Enlightenment, Metisse and many more.

Name origin

Originally, FVWM was the Feeble Virtual Window Manager, which was clearly stated by Robert Nation in a 1997 Linux Journal interview with him, who also claimed the name had been chosen because original releases had almost no user selectable features, so it really was feeble.^[3] However, at some point the meaning of the F was lost. When Google published the old news group archives acquired from DejaNews, the original meaning was re-discovered. However, when Chuck Hine was maintaining the official FVWM Frequently Asked Questions, Chuck had never agreed with the 'feeble' explanation, and added alternate possible meanings of F to the FAQ, with many entries coming from mailing list messages.^[4]

Features

FVWM 2.5 Xsession running on Debian 7 GNU/Linux

This is a partial list based on the documentation distributed with FVWM.

Many of these features can be disabled at runtime or compile time, or dynamically for specific windows or loaded and unloaded as modules, or many other possibilities. These are not rigid features, FVWM does not dictate how the user's desktop should work or look like but provides the mechanisms to configure the desktop to work, look and behave the way the user wants it to.

Supports any number of virtual desktops, each divided into multiple pages.
The viewport (the physical screen) can be moved smoothly (in configurable steps) in the virtual desktop area, independent of pages
The viewport can move automatically when the mouse hits the border of the screen
Full EWMH, ICCCM-2 and GNOME Hints support.
Full internationalisation support, including multi-byte characters and bidirectional text.
Xft2 font support with anti-aliasing, drop shadows of any size, at any offset and at any direction, text rotation.
Any behaviour, action or event is fully configurable.
Support of user defined Window Decoration Styles.
Titlebars can be disabled, or rendered on any window edge. This can be done individually for each window type.
Titlebars may have up to ten icons including minimize, maximize and close buttons.
Animated Window Shading in all directions.
Iconification
Full PNG Support, including alpha blending.
Perl programming library for extending FVWM using Perl, scripting and pre-processing of configuration files.
Can be extended via scripting. Preprocessing allows dynamic configurations.
Toolkit to build dialogs, menus and applications at runtime.
Configurable desktop panels.
Mouse Gestures allow to draw shapes with the mouse, and bind them to commands.
Dynamic menus; utilities to browse the filesystem, fetch headlines from the internet from menus included.
Session management support.
Xinerama extension support to use more than one monitor.
Dynamically extensible using modules.
Supports focus stealing

Derivatives

Notable users

Donald Knuth ^[5]

Related Research Articles

In computing, a desktop environment (DE) is an implementation of the desktop metaphor made of a bundle of programs running on top of a computer operating system that share a common graphical user interface (GUI), sometimes described as a graphical shell. The desktop environment was seen mostly on personal computers until the rise of mobile computing. Desktop GUIs help the user to easily access and edit files, while they usually do not provide access to all of the features found in the underlying operating system. Instead, the traditional command-line interface (CLI) is still used when full control over the operating system is required.

An X window manager is a window manager that runs on top of the X Window System, a windowing system mainly used on Unix-like systems.

Fluxbox is a stacking window manager for the X Window System, which started as a fork of Blackbox 0.61.1 in 2001, with the same aim to be lightweight. Its user interface has only a taskbar, a pop-up menu accessible by right-clicking on the desktop, and minimal support for graphical icons. All basic configurations are controlled by text files, including the construction of menus and the mapping of key-bindings. Fluxbox has high compliance to the Extended Window Manager Hints specification.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Window Maker</span>

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">AfterStep</span> Stacking window manager for the X Window System

AfterStep is a stacking window manager for the X Window System. The goal of AfterStep's development is to provide for flexibility of desktop configuration, improved aesthetics and efficient use of system resources, and was used in such distributions as MachTen. AfterStep originally was a variant of FVWM modified to resemble NeXTSTEP, but as the development cycle progressed, it diverged from its FVWM roots. In 2000, Linux website TuxRadar selected AfterStep as one of the year's best window managers, praising it as "fast and reliable, with a huge range of configuration options and the ability to create some spectacular themes".

A window manager is system software that controls the placement and appearance of windows within a windowing system in a graphical user interface. Most window managers are designed to help provide a desktop environment. They work in conjunction with the underlying graphical system that provides required functionality—support for graphics hardware, pointing devices, and a keyboard—and are often written and created using a widget toolkit.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Virtual desktop</span> User interfaces describe ways in which virtual space of a computers desktop is expanded

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Vtwm</span>

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References

↑ Error: Unable to display the reference properly. See the documentation for details.
↑ "xenocara/app/fvwm/COPYING - view - 1.1.1.1". Cvsweb.openbsd.org. Retrieved 7 October 2017.
1 2 "Linux Journal Interviews Robert Nation". Linuxjournal.com. Retrieved 7 October 2017.
↑ FVWM - History Archived 2011-05-16 at the Wayback Machine
↑ Knuth, Donald E.; Binstock, Andrew (25 April 2008). Interview with Donald Knuth . Retrieved 7 October 2017.

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.

[wikidata-d4cdb31147d69e752d99c73a66674274be8edcc0-v11-1] Error: Unable to display the reference properly. See the documentation for details.

[2] "xenocara/app/fvwm/COPYING - view - 1.1.1.1". Cvsweb.openbsd.org. Retrieved 7 October 2017.

[LJ19971101-3] 1 2 "Linux Journal Interviews Robert Nation". Linuxjournal.com. Retrieved 7 October 2017.

[4] FVWM - History Archived 2011-05-16 at the Wayback Machine

[5] Knuth, Donald E.; Binstock, Andrew (25 April 2008). Interview with Donald Knuth . Retrieved 7 October 2017.

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FVWM

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