🚀 go-pugleaf

4Dwm, and mwm before it, by default execs your $SHELL shell to start up
all exec'ed applications in your .4Dwmrc/.mwmrc .  OSF/Motif did this
in version 1.0, and there was no way to change it other than feeding it
an altered $SHELL.

To me, this was a really dumb default; /bin/sh would have been a much
more sensible choice.  The more heavyweight shells take longer to
start up, so all applications (including "Do you really want to 
log out now?") take at least shell startup time to start.

Shells such as csh and tcsh also produce the "[1] 1023" messages in
your console window every time an application is started from a menu.

Not to mention the fact that it is impossible to put any shell commands
in you wm startup files, because who knows what shell a user is running.

Luckily, the environment variable MWMSHELL was added in the second 
release of Motif, and is available in 4Dwm.  I heartily recommend
adding "MWMSHELL=/bin/sh; export MWMSHELL" to your Xsession file
before the window manager is started.  

To notice the improvment, log out, log back in again, and log out. 
See how the dialog box comes up pleasingly fast the second time.
The smallest things make computers seem faster, somehow....

						Michael Halle
						MIT Media Lab
						halazar@media.mit.edu