FVWM

Just updated fvwm_patches project on GitHub, so all the patches apply on latest FVWM CVS snapshot. This has sent me back to those times when I was amply free and was full of enthusiasm. Let me tell you a story…

Those were the times when I thought installing Gentoo was an accomplishment one brags about to win a girlfriend (I didn’t). It was a new world! I couldn’t understand Mandrake, I hated RedHat, SuSE was giving me graphics problems and I hadn’t heard of Debian or Slackware. So I was excited to have a functioning system after 2 days of hard work and, as a man, was probably closest to what a mother feels holding her baby.

As usual, I installed KDE and for some time it was awesome.

Oops… that is not when I found out about FVWM… my memory… it stinks.

Then I completed my bachelors and went to Germany for doing an internship. I was given the “best” machine, but I had no root access on it and the sysadmin was a jerk. So KDE used to run like molasses. I tried many different window managers, including Openbox, Fluxbox, windowmaker and then some more. I saw FVWM and it was as intuitive as something made by Apple on an opposite day. So I didn’t even consider it.

But I was still unsatisfied. Stuff just didn’t meet my expectations. And I hated right-click to get a menu with ‘Terminals’ and ‘Applications’ as two separate options. I even tried FVWM95.

Anyway, at some point in my quest, I landed at Tavis Ormandy’s config file. And it was as awesome as it is now. I have, actually, never gotten around to learn any of the FVWM commands. But I had learned enough to modify it to my tastes.

In the last two years, I didn’t get to use Linux a lot. But some days ago I finally installed Kubuntu on my office laptop, untarred the old config files saved in my backup drive, and was surprised to learn that it was throwing many many errors and warnings, as well as not being transparent. That is easy, I thought – fix fix fix, and then patch patch patch – except this time the patches weren’t working anymore and I didn’t have Gentoo to manage it all by itself.

Which brings me back to today. I intend to maintain those patches so people like me won’t have to hunt around the internet and obscure mailing lists.