[lug] fvwm: was virtual screens on gnome?

[Jed S. Baer]

On Sun, 11 Feb 2018 17:09:17 -0500
Steve Litt wrote:

> I have a feeling you're just the right person to ask this: I've been
> trying to try out fvwm for 10 years now, and every time I get stopped
> by two things:
> 
> 1) It defaults to tiny fonts so that I can't see to bigafy the fonts.
> 
> 2) The menus require     clicking     on     every     level     .
> 
> 3) The menus are these breakoff things you have to clean up after.
> 
> How do I fix #1, for all fonts, from an environment I can see? Note
> that I can't always see the virtual terminal, because many distros
> think it's hip to tinyfy the virtual terminal font to accommodate 80 200
> character lines.
> 
> Can 2 and 3 be configured away, once I have a font I can see?

The main path the Fvwm happiness lies in editing your config files, using
a text editor. There is no GUI. Okay, maybe in the default config
supplied, there are some capabilities, but those would be things
someone put together using FvwmScript or maybe something more complex,
but Fvwm itself has no GUI config tool. I was recently reminded of how
awful the default config is, when I loaded OpenBSD into a VM. All the
configrations for Fvwm are stored in plain text files. (Okay, there's a
way to do it differently, but that's an advanced topic.)

If you're invoking Fvwm using only the system default configuration, then
I think you'll benefit a lot from creating your own config. What I did,
way back, was plagiarize a bunch of examples from the Fvwm website, which
is currently down, due to a DNS problem. But there are other resources.
 * http://fvwmforums.org/wiki/
 * http://fvwmforums.org/phpBB3/

The biggest issue with Fvwm is that the man page is huge. Plus, depending
on what you're trying to do, other man pages to read, such as FvwmPager
and FvwmButtons. I won't claim that it's easy to digest, and in fact, I'm
certainly lacking in my knowledge of much of it.

It sounds as if one of the main things you'll want to do is this line:
DefaultFont xft:DejaVu Sans:Medium:Book:size=15
somewhere in your config. Substituting what you like for the font.

However, that doesn't have the same effect as specifying the default font
in a Desktop Environment. It applies only to things Fvwm does. I assume
that in whatever VT program you're using, there's config screens to set
the font and geometry. I use Konsole, and mate-terminal, and haven't
encountered that issue.

I can't speak to #2 and #3, as I don't experience those issues. Again,
some setting in the default config you're using?

Also, IIRC, Fvwm, if it finds a user config, does not use the system
config at all, so I don't believe you can create a minimal user config to
modify only certain things in the system config. Maybe there is a way to
do that, but I've never tried. On my system, there is
no /etc/system.fvwm2rc, nor a config file in /usr/share/fvwm/ so I'm not
sure I even have a system default, except whatever minimal stuff is baked
into the executable. There are lots of things in /usr/share/fvwm/ to use
either explicitly by using the "Read" command to include them in your
config, or by plagiarizing.

When I recently went on a binge to modernize my Fvwm config, I actually
did a lot of it in a VM, so I wouldn't b0rk my running system.

> Try hotkeying Suckless Tools' dmenu into your environment. It's much
> more discoverable than the command prompt, and usually requires fewer
> keystrokes. Dmenu is a productivity fountain.

Thanks, I'll investigate that.