introduction

As a good introduction, here is what you can find on the official site:

FVWM is an extremely powerful ICCCM-compliant multiple virtual desktop window manager for the X Window system. Development is active, and support is excellent. Check it out!

Mainly, it means that this WM (read Window Manager) can be configured as you want it to be, and can make what you want it to make. But this will not be accomplished without a bare minimum of effort…

I’m not supposed to re-invent what other (more clever) people already invented. This page is not a FVWM tutorial/guide/Development Zone/… but simply contains some considerations about this great, what did I say, FABULOUS WM (maybe that’s what the F of Fvwm stand for… who knows 😉 ), and will of course link to all those tutorials/guides/Dev Zone… .

from scratch…?

After emerging FVWM (not FVWM-Crystal… for this one see below), and login into a session, here is mainly what you get as default WM…(click to enlarge):

Come back please… I know, it’s ugly, terrible, it sucks and it looks like bullshit… But that’s only the default desktop…

Here is the result of some hours of hacking into the config file:

Much better huh? Follow this guide these steps to custom your desktop you own way!

FVWM-Crystal

Let’s take the good old habits back. From fvwm-crystal.berlios.de:

FVWM-Crystal aims to create an easy to use, eye-candy but also powerful desktop environment for Linux or other Unix-like operating systems. It uses following programs: FVWM as a window manager and “main core”, ROX-Filer as file manager (manages icons on the desktop), xterm, aterm, mrxvt or urxvt as terminal emulators, MPD or XMMS as music players (there’s built-in support for controlling these programs), and several other tools for different functions, like setting a wallpaper or making screen shots.

The default destkop looks like this

your very own configuration file

Imagine you are not totally satisfied with the FVWM-Crystal desktop… just like me. Then the only good solution is to write your own configuration file, totally from scratch. This sounds like a really hard task, and unless you are happy with a dumb gray colored startbar and some ugly icons, it is! Or at least at the beginning.

They are indeed a lot of sites out there that speak about configuring FVWM. One of the most usefull is the FVWM Beginners Guide, or its French translation if you prefer to read it in French. It explains almost everything you need to write a descent config file, containing basic settings like the number of virtual desktops, the Focus behavior, mouse and key bindings, … menu, buttons, icons settings, …

It will maybe sounds “geeky”, but the man pages are really a GREAT source of information for your configuration!

A great tip is to split your config file into many little config files, each one for a topic: menu, window decorations, buttons, … Otherwise, the config file becomes rapidly unreadable. You will find my config files in the files section.

other ressources

Here are some other ressources that might be useful while creating your file:

• The FVWM official site of course, where you can find some screenshots, some config files, and lot more.
• The FVWM forums site might provide you with a lot of help!
• Gulivert’s site contains some config files that can serve as examples, or inspiration.
• Guistyles features a lot of configurations.
• Think: a website with some configs, some scripts, …

I hope you enjoyed this, and have a lot of fun configuring FVWM!