Home > FVWM

1 History

In July 1993, irritated with the then ubiquitous twm after experiencing many of its limitations during his work analysing acoustic signatures for the DoD, Rob Nation began hacking twm to find out why it used so much memory, and to add support for virtual desktops .

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 window managers in use today are related to fvwm, Afterstep, XFce, enlightenment, 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 DejaNewsDejaNews is the old name of Deja. com, a site responsible for archiving and providing queries into the huge amount of information available in Usenet posts. Google acquired Deja. com's Usenet search technology, including the Usenet archive on February 12t, the original meaning was re-discovered, however the fvwm developers decided they prefer the "Mysterious F" interpretation and it has stuck to this day.

2 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.

• Full EWMH, ICCM2 and Gnome Hints support.
  • These standards allow fvwm to interact with desktop environments such as GnomeThis article is about the mythical creatures. For alternate meanings see Gnome (disambiguation). A race of small beings that live underground. According to Paracelsus, gnomes are the most important of the earth spirits. He wrote that they move as easily t and KDEKDE K D esktop E nvironment) is a free desktop environment and development platform built with Trolltech's Qt toolkit. It runs on most Unix and Unix-like systems, such as Linux, BSD and Solaris. There are also ports to Mac OS X using its X11 layer and Mic.
• Full internationalisation support, including multi-byte characters and bidirectional text.
  • Fvwm has been translated into many languages using gettext, supports Asian characters, and bidirectional languages, e.g. Hebrew. Fvwm can be used to make a very accessible environment, for example mouse-less operation.
• Xft2 font support.
  • Anti-aliasinga) (b) (c) Figure 1 Anti-aliasing in digital signal processing is the technique of minimizing aliasing when representing a high-resolution signal at a lower resolution. In most cases, anti-aliasing means removing data at too high a frequency to represent., drop shadows of any size, at any offset and at any direction, text rotation, and many other features.
• Titlebars can be disabled, or rendered on any window edge.
• Animated Window Shading in all directions, including diagonal.
• Shading windows allow you to hide windows while you work on something else.
• Full PNGPNG Portable Network Graphics , sometimes pronounced as ping , is a relatively new bitmap image format that is becoming popular on the World Wide Web and elsewhere. PNG was largely developed to deal with some of the shortcomings of the GIF format and allo Support, including alpha blendingAlpha blending is a convex combination of two colors allowing for transparency effects in computer graphics. The value of alpha in the color code ranges from 0. 0 represents a fully transparent color, and 1. 0 represents a fully opaque color. The value of.
  • You can create png images for use in your titlebars and menus, alpha blending allows you to create some very attractive effects.
• PerlImage:Programming-republic-of-perl. gif|right|framed|Programming Republic of logo]] Perl also Practical Extraction and Report Language (a backronym, see below), is a programming language released by Larry Wall on December 18, 1987 that borrows features fr library for extending Fvwm using Perl, scripting and pre-processing of Configuration files using m4, Perl or CPP.
• Fvwm can easily be extended, scripting and pre-processing allows you to make dynamic Fvwm configurations.
• Build dialogs, menus and applications with FvwmForm, FvwmGtk and FvwmScript Fvwm provides the tools you need to make user interaction work the way you want.
• Powerful and dynamic Interfaces can be created with FvwmButtons.
  • FvwmButtons is a powerful module for creating panels on your desktop, it can swallow other applications, change dynamically, and has many other features.
• Support for Mouse Gestures.
  • Mouse gestures allow you to draw shapes with your mouse, and bind them to commands.
• Create dynamic menus, several utilities for making use of this feature are included with Fvwm.
  • Fvwm includes utilities for browsing your filesystem, fetch headlines from the internet, and much more all from your menus.
• Session management support.
  • Use a session manager to create desktop states, save your fvwm session exactly as you left it and recreate it when you return.
• Xinerama extension support.
  • Use fvwm with two or more monitors, fvwm will allow you to work with the monitors seamlessly and efficiently.
• Dynamically extensible using modules.
  • Use only the features you require, load and unload modules as you require them.