FVWM |
The F() Virtual Window Manager (The F currently has no official meaning) 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 systems.
=History=
In July 1993, irritated with the then-ubiquitous Twm after experiencing many of its limitations during his work analysing acoustic signatures for the United States Department of Defense, Rob Nation began hacking twm to find out why it used so much memory, and to add support for virtual window manager.
Already well known for his popular rxvt terminal emulator, Rob worked on reducing the memory consumption of his new window manager. Deciding to test FVWM s reception, on June 1, 1993 Rob bundled it with an rxvt release, it was a success, many people were tired of the awkward and limited twm and were hungry for a capable replacement.
FVWM is renowned for its high quality code base; many developers base their own projects on FVWM in order to benefit from the years of refinement and development. Many of the popular , and many more.
Originally, FVWM was the Feeble Virtual Window Manager , but 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 the FVWM developers decided they prefer the Mysterious F interpretation and it has stuck to this day.
In 1994 Rob Nation stopped developing FVWM, and made Chuck 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 2005, fvwm-1.24r still compiles and runs on a modern Linux system without problem. A small number of users continue to use the older FVWM release.
=Features=
An extensive list of FVWM features would require a very large document; this is a partial list based on the version 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, the FVWM developers do not propose to know how your desktop should work or look like, these can be configured to work, look and behave the way you want them to.
= Quotations =
FVWM is the way to go. [...] Looks nice, works fine, has all the important features and is small to boot. I like much of the twm stuff, but twm is rather ugly and has some problems. FVWM looks much nicer and does it all and is very configurable. : Linus Torvalds, Project coordinator and original developer of the Linux kernel, in 16 Dec. 1993 comp.os.coherent Usenet post.[http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.coherent/msg/e4673e2bb97ced9f]
Question: What is your favourite window manager Alan: Are you trying to start a fight with someone I don t know. Mostly I used fvwm. [...] What I probably think is the neatest window manager, which I don t run, is window maker. : Alan Cox, Linux kernel programmer, 2nd Linux-Tag conference (28 Nov. 1999).[http://wt.xpilot.org/publications/guug_mal/003/]
I ve been a confirmed fan of fvwm ever since I started using this layout; it increases my efficiency fantastically. Every other Linux window system has bad ideas about the focussing --- every option of KDE and GNOME is broken in some important way! : Donald Knuth, 31 Dec. 2003 posting to the fvwm mailing list.[http://www.mail-archive.com/fvwm@hpc.uh.edu/msg05172.html]
The name FVWM used to stand for something, but I forgot what. (Feeble, famous, foobar It doesn t really matter, this is an acronym based society anyway.) : Rob Nation, in an early FVWM man page. See also: [http://www.fvwm.org/documentation/faq/#1.1 fvwm faq].
=Derivatives=
= Resources =
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