An amazing window manager

-.Disclaimer: read this first, please.-

Note that the decorations shown in this page are by now a "bit" old, I do not use these config anymore, and most of them might not even exist in the repositories. All the configs I keep are stored in the download section. So, if it's not there then it simply doesn't exist any longer.

-.Standard disclaimer.-

Please, note that I am by no means affiliated to FVWM in any official way, so, don't take my words as they were any universal truth. Those are just the random thoughts of a grateful FVWM user, that wanted to tell to the world how happy FVWM makes him everyday that he has to spend sitting in front of a computer.

-.What is FVWM?.-

FVWM is the most amazing Window Manager ever programmed for the X-Window networking and display protocol. It is known to compile under several flavours of commercial UNIX OS'es, and also a lot of non-commercial clones, being the most notorious one Linux. Most POSIX compliant OS'es that are capable of running X can also run FVWM. For example: FreeBSD. And probably many more.

Now, I have been using FVWM for my daily work for years, and can only give thanks to everyone involved in constantly making it better and better. While on its origins, FVWM was a hack on TWM to solve some memory leaks and add a couple of features, it has greatly evolved, and is a completely rewrote piece of software. It is stable, fast, it is solid, and relatively error free (no piece of software is perfect). It has a memory footprint that makes you smile when you see what it can do. I love it :)

You can read more about FVWM and see some screen shots at its home page and the Wikipedia

FVWM is not the kind of Window Manager that can make you happy if you like shadows, transparencies, dancing windows and rotating cubes on your desktop. There is Beryl for that. The kind of "eye candy" that you can get with FVWM is different. You can use xcompmgr if that makes you happy, it is even in the menu, but it is unstable, crappy, has tons of bugs, is slow, and my config cannot fix that. No, I don't plan to make a compositor not to patch FVWM to do so, and I doubt that the FVWM workers will be doing that either for a long long time, if at all. Again, I punctuate that these are my words, and I am in no way speaking in the name of FVWM developer(s).

-.But, exactly, why should I use FVWM?.-

Probably you shouldn't ;P Seriously, FVWM requires some will to learn, it is not what most people call "a friendly desktop" out of the box. FVWM is just a Window Manager, with very advanced features, but with no default config -almost- and no other tools than the manual pages, which, by the way, are excellent. There are quite a few sites on internet where you can find some help to set up a working environment using FVWM as a base with the minimal pain.

The good part is that, if you are ready to learn new things, you will find that there is much FVWM can do for you. FVWM can control every single window in any way, can handle windows via commands and can bind those commands to any key or mouse button, or even to a mouse gesture. You can define functions that will make your windows shake, move, scroll from any invisible location just in front of your eyes.

It can handle dynamic stuff as well, and has mechanisms to get input from other programs, like bash or python. It has very good integration with perl, you can write additional modules to support new features, and it has also a proper scripting language (though I must admit that I don't love FvwmScript too much). FVWM gives you the control over your windows, and much more... that is, if you are ready to take it.

While FVWM is catalogued as a Window Manager, it is also true that it has features that are not usually found in a traditional Window Manager. Most of them added using modules, like FvwmIconMan (a very configurable task bar) or FvwmButtons (the most impressive module in my opinion). FvwmButtons can be used to swallow any application or applet, and it can also hold any number of buttons and much more.

FvwmEvents can watch for events and then parse them through a custom function to make any task, it doesn't matter how complex it is, based in things like "crossing a window frame", "mapping a new window" or "starting FVWM". Of course, the basic usage of this feature is to associate system sound to the Window Manager events, but FVWM can do much more than that.

When you first login into FVWM you can see only a grey background that shows a very little menu when clicked. This has been done intentionally, many times people discussed in forums and mailing lists about a default configuration for FVWM, but it seems that they don't want to tie any particular image to FVWM, because FVWM has really no face. It can look any way you want, and work any way you want.

-.Well, what about some examples?.-

You can see a few screen shots of some old configs, that I rescued from old posts in some forums, if you click in the small thumbnails from the right side. I don't have the configuration tarballs for most of these configs anymore.

You can see in the files repository some tarballs dated on the year 2005, those are from my first dynamically configurable config, that I called MultiConfig, and that is shown in the screen shots from A.jpg to G.jpg. somewhere in the middle of the list. The older files are just there because I feel pity to kill them (now I miss all my old configs that died a horrible death on a very very old hard drive that broke). If you wanna try that config you can use the latest tarball dated on 2006, which is this one.

For the inpatients, there is my repository, you can see some configs, they all have the date of creation on its names.

Click here if you want to go to my FVWM configs repository.

And you can see more screen shots and download more configuration tarballs in the FVWM Forums link that I provide below this line:

Click here if you want to go to the "Screen shots & configs" section in the FVWM Forums.

Being that said, I warn you that screen shots show really nothing of what FVWM is: another way of understanding a window based interface. They don't say anything at all about the true capabilities of FVWM.