🚀 go-pugleaf

On 5 Jan 93 14:31:03 GMT, beck@irzr17.inf.tu-dresden.de (Andre Beck) said:

Andre> One vote for olvwm, you get the virtual screens and much more,
Andre> and it's free !!!

Olvwm is quite good. OpenLook is also a quite snazzy look and fell,
light and sporty, compared with the corporate heaviness of Motif. Olvwm
also is configured using a fairly complete set of resources, and with a
nice format menu file.

The only problem with olvwm is that of course it uses the xview toolkit.
This means that to install olvwm you also have to install xview, and
that if you use non xview application you end up with paging in two
toolkit libraries, which swells the working set.

beck> IMHO vtwm is the best one. Especially after patching it to support
beck> general AutoRaise and AutoRaiseDelay options.

The problems with vtwm are:

 * A lot of the configuration whould be done with resource files, not
   with trhe twmrc. In particular fonts!

 * the virtual desktop panner has funny behaviour, especially suprising
   pointer warps; generally less smooth behaviour than tvtwm.

The advantages are:

 * Like olvwm it creates a virtual screen without actually creating a
   new root window. This may be considered a disadvantage too.

Tvtwm is pretty OK, and would be superior to vtwm if only it were
possible to choose at startup whether it used a new virtual root window
like it does now, or not, like vtwm and tvtwm.

In general all twm variants would be far more usable is they used
resources (no, using m4 like piewm is not quite ok, as m4 can have very
suprising behaviour due to rescan). Indeed twm should be changed to make
use of Xaw and Xt.

beck> If mwm would have vtwm's Virtual Desktop features, it would rule.

Mwm does not quite compete. Motif is so heavy, and mwm is heavy too, and
has several bizarre rules. In any case mvwm does exist; somebody has
made available beta quality patches to mwm it seems mostly to work.



All in all I'd say the most elegant wm is olvwm, if one uses only xview
toolkit applications, or does not mind paging in the xview libraries;
then it's a toss between tvtwm (more sophisticated, but the virtual root
window can be a drawback) and vtwm (a bit cruder, but no virtual root
window). ctwm will only be liked by those that like workspaces a la HP VUE.
--
Piercarlo Grandi, Dept of CS, PC/UW@Aberystwyth <pcg@aber.ac.uk>
  E l'italiano cantava, cantava. E le sue disperate invocazioni giunsero
  alle orecchie del suo divino protettore, il dio della barzelletta