Re: FVWM: Some suggestions -a rant

From: Tessa Lau <tlau_at_ofb.net>
Date: Fri, 17 Jan 2003 13:51:14 -0500

On Friday, Maciej Kalisiak mumbled:
> Note though that fvwm-themes is not a panacea for new FVWM users...
> not yet.

Nor is it a panacea for experienced FVWM users!

I've configured a lot of FVWM's behavior in the past, but I had yet to
tackle the problem of making it look pretty beyond selecting different
colors for the window borders.

So I was intrigued by fvwm-theme's purported ability to make FVWM look
like any number of other window managers. However, I don't need to be
able to swap themes at the click of a button! While that's nice eye
candy for newbies, and I did spend some time playing with the
different looks, I just want a single lightweight configuration that I
understand and can tweak easily. For example: I couldn't tell
fvwm-themes that I only wanted two desktops! So what I did was to rip
out the "nanogui" theme and hardcode it into my fvwm2rc, along with
my existing FVWM customizations.

However the process of ripping out just that one look-and-feel was not
at all simple; I had to read through all of the fvwm-themes
configurations and peel out portions of the nanogui configuration from
a multitude of different files. There's a lot of knowledge embodied
within the fwvm-themes package, but it's not very easy to use it
unless you give up your existing customization and buy into the entire
dynamically-generated-fvwm-configuration framework.

What I did when I extracted the nanogui theme was to keep the
nanogui-specific configuration in separate files. I'm using the
Debian system.fvwm2rc, which reads in user-supplied hooks at key
points. So my hooks import the nanogui theme along with my other
customization.

This solution is much less intimidating and less heavyweight than
using fvwm-themes, especially for people who already have a
configuration they're comfortable with and just want to make it look
pretty. I would love to see other themes broken out into similar
config-files that can be added to an existing FVWM configuration
simply by adding a Read command.

--Tessa
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Received on Fri Jan 17 2003 - 12:52:28 GMT

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