From owner-freebsd-questions Fri Oct 27 18:39:42 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from guru.mired.org (okc-27-149-77.mmcable.com [24.27.149.77]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 0FCDF37B479 for ; Fri, 27 Oct 2000 18:39:40 -0700 (PDT) Received: (qmail 69432 invoked by uid 100); 28 Oct 2000 01:39:38 -0000 From: Mike Meyer MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <14842.11866.726422.426239@guru.mired.org> Date: Fri, 27 Oct 2000 20:39:38 -0500 (CDT) To: Nate Puri Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Satisfied w/ your desktop? In-Reply-To: <63353699@toto.iv> X-Mailer: VM 6.75 under 21.1 (patch 10) "Capitol Reef" XEmacs Lucid X-face: "5Mnwy%?j>IIV\)A=):rjWL~NB2aH[}Yq8Z=u~vJ`"(,&SiLvbbz2W`;h9L,Yg`+vb1>RG% *h+%X^n0EZd>TM8_IB;a8F?(Fb"lw'IgCoyM.[Lg#r\ Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Nate Puri writes: > In light of using the highly integrated Windows > desktop or the Mac OS X desktop, what configurations > for FBSD do you use that are comparable? Comparable how? Features? Size? Usability? Style? Design? Coolness? > I'm trying a lot of different stuff now. XFce, KDE1, > KDE2, GNOME, Afterstep, WindowMaker, BlackBox and a > combination of apps that are better than 1.x. I've > tried them all. I'd just like to hear thoughts on what > people use who have used their configuration for a > long time now without switching. I consider all those window managers to be large, clunky and obnoxiously distracting. My physical desk does nothing but hold up the things I need to work on/with, and otherwise stays out of the way. That pretty much describes what I want from all my tools - let me do the job, use as little space (both memory and screen) as you can doing it, and don't distract me with geegaws. I use lwm, configured (with that marvelous Gnu Configuration Command gcc) to provide a windows with a "get out of my way" feature: a right click in the border lowers them. The left and middle mouse buttons in the root window each run a 9menu command to bring up a list of commonly used tools (slightly faster than typing into an xterm). These are both shell scripts whose name lwm reads from an X resource. The right mouse button in the root brings up a list of "iconified" applications (and they appear nowhere else: no dock, no icon window, no menubar, nada). Changing this requires reconfiguration with gcc. Given that I use black-on-white xterms & editor windows pretty extensively, and my WM has zero desktop presence, it shouldn't surprise you to know that I've been asked - more than once - why I have a black-and-white system. It should also now be obvious why people don't pay me to design GUIs.