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Old 9th January 2009
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Oko Oko is offline
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Join Date: May 2008
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Quote:
Originally Posted by jggimi View Post
There is not enough information in your problem report. We don't know your hardware architecture, or anything about your hardware configuration, or even what release of OpenBSD you are running. Your dmesg would give us all three.
I completely agree with your assessment. It appears that the guy is trying to use xmodmap. That might be because he is left handed and wants to use the mouse with his left hand or because he needs non English key board layout. I have at list three books about X Window system on my shelf and I would be more than happy to seek for a solution as long as the information about problem are provided.

Quote:
Originally Posted by jggimi View Post
Personally, I find fvwm a horrid window manager; it is built-in, but that's it only value as far as I'm concerned. (I understand Theo likes it, which is why it's there.)

Along with fvwm, cwm is also built-in.
TWM is also shipped with X Window system so OpenBSD has three window managers in its base. I personally use CWM which is essentially a fork of CWM you will find in ports of FreeBSD or NetBSD. It is almost completely rewritten by OpenBSD developers and clean of any bugs. However CWM is not point and click WM which might be hard for some people to swallow.
It rather uses key bindings heavily. My wife who is not Unix nor BSD enthusiast is using it without much fuss only after reading half a page of man pages.

I would respectfully disagree with jggimi about fvwm. Fvwm is one of the most customizable window managers in existence. OpenBSD is shipping old version Fvwm not the new one fvwm2 which is patched by OpenBSD team. Whole books are written about fvwm and since many people (Theo for instance) are using it for a very, very long time there is no reason to be removed from the base.

TWM is also an excellent choice. If you are using different Unix like system is probably the best choice since it can be found on any machine running X Window system. It can be configured very nicely.

http://81.174.174.115/twm/twmrc.htm

I would restrain however from using Vdesk (which author suggests in the above link) for virtual desks as it is very buggy and completely undocumented peace of software (which is also a big BUG). You can use CTWM from ports to achieve the same functionality (it is just an extension to TWM). You can also find in ports tvtwm which is essentially version TWM with virtual desktops.


I noticed on XOrg mailing list that somebody cleaned TWM after 15 years of non-activity and few rare bugs are removed. The support for virtual desktops is also added. I believe that version of TWM will be shipped starting XOrg 7.5.

As of many different WM in the ports I would stick with the base for everything (and you will be shocked what you can find inside default OpenBSD installation) unless you really have compelling reason to use something else. Just my 2c.

Last edited by Oko; 9th January 2009 at 06:14 PM.
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