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Fvwm

Good god, this looks like something out of the 1990s -- Anonymous Coward, Slashdot

History/Capabilities

In 1993, Robert Nation, who was working analysing acoustic signatures for the US DoD decided that he wanted to learn more about X11, as he found that the de facto window manager (TWM) was not fast enough, used too much memory, and he had always wanted to write his own. Hence, FVWM was born!

Rob Nation was also creating his own terminal emulator (RXVT) at the same time which is how FVWM was originally released.

Fvwm has always been modelled on having a core (written in C), which handles things such as:

Window placement
Window decoration (although not always -- this was via FvwmThemes)
Key / Mouse bindings

The idea with this architecture is now commonplace, especially with having modules which extend its functionality. Examples of such modules include:

FvwmAnimate -- used to animate a window being iconified/deiconified
FvwmButtons -- used to swallow other applications, and can create grid layouts showing information, etc.
FvwmConsole -- used to talk to Fvwm directly, using the same commands as what can be entered into its config file.

Over the years, there have been many modules written for Fvwm and adopted by the project. Language bindings have also existed, especially in Perl which has allowed people to write external scripts to manipulate Fvwm's functionality. In fact, this method is known as its "module interface" which is a protocol-based mechanism allowing modules to register interest in events generated by Fvwm which modules can the act upon once received.

Roots in MWM's style

Back in the early 1990s when Fvwm was more than just a twinkle in the eye of Rob Nation, the dominant proprietary WMs were either CDE or MWM. Out of the box (and to this day), the window deorations in Fvwm are still reminiscent of that Mwm look. There's even still, some styles which are specific to handling Mwm styles, and even OLWM (OpenLook Window Manager, pedelled mostly via Sun Microsystems).

Early users would take great pains to try and keep the Mwm look, and a lot of the early examples mimick this, albeit with a few artistic licenses:

[IMAGE]: fvwm looking like MWM

[IMAGE]: another MWM-like example

Virtual Desktops

Fvwm's approach to virtual desktops had always existed, unlike with some other WMs (such as CTWM) which had to have the "virtual" aspected added later on. A Virtual Desktop is a concept whereby the root window is "divided" into a grid, and each grid is a separate instance where windows can be placed. They are typically navigated by a pager (FvwmPager as a module exists in Fvwm). Nowadays the concept is fairly common, although Windows 10 only really acquired it quite recently!

Progression

Over its 25+ year history, Fvwm has seen many contributions from a lot of different people. It still exists to this day, and is in active development in the guise of fvwm3:

[HTTP]: fvwm3 on Github

Devlopment of Fvwm3

I have a log of thoughts and activities around Fvwm3, here's a link to that:

[FVWM3 Gemlog]