At 5:14 Uhr +0100 23.01.2000, Miles Nordin wrote:
>On Sat, 22 Jan 2000, Kadari Mayson wrote:
>
>> What is everyone's favorite X environment?
>
>olvwm is my favorite.  twm is a distant second.
>
>I picked up olvwm a while ago, and like it because it's simple, clean, and
>has an amusingly detailed vitual console implementation. these days olvwm
>seems to be rare and poorly respected outside Solaris, probably largely
>due to the fact that RedHat desupported it in favour of glitzy junk after
>release 4.2.  Also, we only have olwm (sans virtual desktop) in pkgsrc,
>which is a point against it--olvwm is a bit hard to find and doesn't
>compile as cleanly as modern window managers.  It's unmaintained.

Which is a pity. I ran olvwm for quite some time both on mac68k at home and
i386 at work. I have always preferred OpenLook to Motif, feeling that there
was an X GUI with original elements and not just copying widgets like Motif
(from Windows 3.x) or KDE (from a mess of Windows 3.11/95/OpenLook). I even
got the OpenLook & XView cdrom from Darwin Open Systems, but never did much
with it.

Since last week, I have to do some Java work on a Sun Ultra 10 running
Solaris 2.6, and I turned away from CDE with disgust and fired up
OpenWindows. Unfortunately, Sun only ships OLWM.

Still, I finally turned back to fvwm 1.24 on the Mac because a) it is the
fastest wm with virtual screens I have seen and b) I found its
focus-follows-mouse implementation more flexible in that it offers a "lazy"
option where the focus stays with the last window when your mouse cursor
slips off to the desktop. Nothing more annoying than two-finger-typing a
sentence just to discover that the letters have gone off into the void.  ;)

My personal recommendation at the moment is wmx, a lean wm (also in the
package collection, but you may consider building it yourself)  which is
unusual in that it does not use a 20k config file. Instead, you configure
it at compile time. It has got virtual screens ("channels"), popup menues,
and that's about it. And it looks cool.

	hauke


--
"It's never straight up and down"     (DEVO)