Subject: Re: FVWM: Some suggestions -a rant

From: Tessa Lau <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 17 Jan 2003 13:51:14 -0500

On Friday, Maciej Kalisiak mumbled:
> Note though that fvwm-themes is not a panacea for new FVWM users...
> not yet. 

Nor is it a panacea for experienced FVWM users!

I've configured a lot of FVWM's behavior in the past, but I had yet to
tackle the problem of making it look pretty beyond selecting different
colors for the window borders.

So I was intrigued by fvwm-theme's purported ability to make FVWM look
like any number of other window managers.  However, I don't need to be
able to swap themes at the click of a button!  While that's nice eye
candy for newbies, and I did spend some time playing with the
different looks, I just want a single lightweight configuration that I
understand and can tweak easily.  For example: I couldn't tell
fvwm-themes that I only wanted two desktops!  So what I did was to rip
out the "nanogui" theme and hardcode it into my fvwm2rc, along with
my existing FVWM customizations.

However the process of ripping out just that one look-and-feel was not
at all simple; I had to read through all of the fvwm-themes
configurations and peel out portions of the nanogui configuration from
a multitude of different files.  There's a lot of knowledge embodied
within the fwvm-themes package, but it's not very easy to use it
unless you give up your existing customization and buy into the entire
dynamically-generated-fvwm-configuration framework.

What I did when I extracted the nanogui theme was to keep the
nanogui-specific configuration in separate files.  I'm using the
Debian system.fvwm2rc, which reads in user-supplied hooks at key
points.  So my hooks import the nanogui theme along with my other
customization.

This solution is much less intimidating and less heavyweight than
using fvwm-themes, especially for people who already have a
configuration they're comfortable with and just want to make it look
pretty.  I would love to see other themes broken out into similar
config-files that can be added to an existing FVWM configuration
simply by adding a Read command.

--Tessa
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---

From: Maciej Kalisiak <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 17 Jan 2003 14:28:20 -0500

On Fri, Jan 17, 2003 at 01:51:14PM -0500, Tessa Lau wrote:
> For example: I couldn't tell fvwm-themes that I only wanted two desktops!  So
> what I did was to rip out the "nanogui" theme and hardcode it into my
> fvwm2rc, along with my existing FVWM customizations.

Hey, that was one of the excruciatingly frustrating problems I had as well!
That, and trying to override the menubar font in the osx theme... I just ended
up falling back to my comfortable and understandable, if rather homely,
.fvwm2rc file...  I guess I'm not ready for fvwm-themes yet (or fvwm-themes is
not ready for me).

Having said that, I hope work on fvwm-themes continues at a healthy pace.  I've
seen Mikhael's screenshot using fvwm-themes from CVS on the FVWM website and
I'm already drooling with anticipation... :)

-- 
Maciej Kalisiak       mac "at" dgp.toronto.edu       www.dgp.toronto.edu/~mac

---

From: Dennis McGregor <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 18 Jan 2003 10:10:13 +1100

> --Tessa

after using fvwm for a few years, I thought I had a pretty good setup
with all the minor tweaks and features I'd added here and there...
Then I tried out fvwm-themes and *really* found out just how much can be
done with this superior WM. 
I too wanted to customise the theme that I eventually constructed within
the fvwm-themes framework and went about gathering all the includes
into one spot so I could be sure I knew what I was dealing with when it
came time to change anything. But still the process was suboptimal in terms 
of knowing just where to go to change some detail or other...
Thankfully, it's not that much trouble to consolidate your setup from fvwm-themes... 
-From the FAQ:
"You can always get the fvwm configuration in one file (a-la .fvwm2rc)
of the currently used configuration (so called "current" theme) by
executing:
% fvwm-themes-config --expand-rc >current-fvwmrc
You can skip the contents at the start responsible to manipulation of themes."

Worked for me.
After that, of course, one has to go about making the generated file comprehendable,
which for me involved splitting that large file into a bunch of Read'able ones,
but at least I knew that I had a standalone file to work with, and could forget
about changing something that would affect other configurations in other
files...

but here I've just quoted from the FAQ - and I must apologise for stating the
obvious by doing such.

chars,

^d

---

From: Mikhael Goikhman <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 18 Jan 2003 02:59:32 +0000

On 17 Jan 2003 14:28:20 -0500, Maciej Kalisiak wrote:
> > For example: I couldn't tell fvwm-themes that I only wanted two
> > desktops!  So what I did was to rip out the "nanogui" theme and
> > hardcode it into my fvwm2rc, along with my existing FVWM
> > customizations.
> 

I appreciate your opinions.

But please be more specific. There is no such FVWM setting as a number of
desks, you have infinitive number of desks for free. Do you mean a number
of desks shown in FvwmPager-Desker? You may edit the themes if you like.
The proper solution is to create your own theme including a new modules
component which you design how ever you want (FvwmButtons, FvwmIconMan,
FvwmPager or others) in the similar format. You may ask if you are stuck.

Or you mean you want to hardcode a number of pages? Modules in some themes
require specific number of pages (6x1) to look nice. Anyway, you may try
to force "DesktopSize 3x2" in ~/.fvwm/themes/personal/modules-extra file.

> That, and trying to override the menubar font in the osx theme...

If you want to change this font you may edit themes/osx/menustyle file.

There is another solution that does not require modifying system files.
The following will force your specified font to all menus. I don't really
suggest this, since it may look not nice with other themes, but it is ok.
Create file ~/.fvwm/themes/personal/fonts-extra that looks like:

  DestroyFunc FuncFvwmSetFont-Menu
  AddToFunc   FuncFvwmSetFont-Menu
  + I MenuStyle "$0" Font -adobe-helvetica-medium-r-*-*-*-120-*

> I just ended up falling back to my comfortable and understandable, if
> rather homely, .fvwm2rc file...  I guess I'm not ready for fvwm-themes
> yet (or fvwm-themes is not ready for me).
> 
> Having said that, I hope work on fvwm-themes continues at a healthy
> pace.  I've seen Mikhael's screenshot using fvwm-themes from CVS on the
> FVWM website and I'm already drooling with anticipation... :)

Well, you may always install the cvs version to see how it progresses.
Otherwise, please be patient, it takes time to create and polish things.

Regards,
Mikhael.

---

From: Maciej Kalisiak <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 17 Jan 2003 23:22:53 -0500

On Fri, Jan 17, 2003 at 09:59:32PM -0500, Mikhael Goikhman wrote:
> of desks shown in FvwmPager-Desker?

Well, speaking for myself, it was the number of pages per desk, as well as the
naming of the desks.  I wanted to use 5 desks of size 1x1, instead of the usual
4 in 2x2 format.  I wanted to edit this setting in the theme I was using, but a
cursory glance didn't turn up anything.  Now, I'm sure if I really put my mind
to it, I would find it eventually.  But I think the main point of fvwm-themes
is to make all these configuration things as near a no-brainer as possible.
Hence my frustration at it.

> to force "DesktopSize 3x2" in ~/.fvwm/themes/personal/modules-extra file.

This is part of the problem I kept encountering: I'm fairly familiar with the
basic configuration options and methods of .fvwm2rc files, but in the
fvwm-themes setting I don't really know what goes where, or where to look for a
particular .fvwm2rc option.  Some things aren't too bad, like for example
setting the various well defined color sets in the "colors" component, but, for
example, DesktopSize in modules/modules-extra?  I would have never guessed.  As
a fvwm-themes newbie I would have rather suspected it would be somewhere in
"settings", or maybe even "startup"...

Which leads me to ask: can anyone outline the purpose/content of the canonical
components?  Or perhaps this is already mentioned somewhere, or in some file?
I think as a fvwm-themes newcomer this is the most vital piece of information
I'm missing at the moment.  Although some components are self-explanatory, such
as colors or fonts, others aren't: what's windowlook, and how's it differ from
globallook, and what's globalfeel?

> If you want to change this font you may edit themes/osx/menustyle file.

We're talking about the menubar that's at the top of the workspace, right?
(only present in osx theme, as a module, and not the regular menus one gets by
clicking various mouse buttons on root window)

If we're indeed talking about the same menubar, then again, it didn't occur to
me to look at "menustyle"... "fonts" seems like the most reasonable place to
look... (at least to me)

I tried all kinds of things by playing around with the "fonts" component.  No
beans.  I was able to change the window title font, others, but never the
menubar at top of workspace.  Odd.

BTW, just in case this is news, with the osx theme, and only with that theme, I
get frequent pixmap corruption.  For example this would happen: I would click
on root to get the main menu, everything is fine; the next time I bring that
menu up, the menu background pixmap is garbled with some dark vertical lines
evenly spaced; the next time it's fine again; then garbled again.  It's not
always exactly alternating like this, sometimes twice in a row it would be
garbled, or twice correct.  Similar occurs anywhere else that background pixmap
is used.  (I'm using FVWM 2.5.5; haven't tried fvwm-themes before so I can't
say whether this is recent behaviour)

-- 
"Worry is interest paid on trouble before it comes due."
				-- William R. Inge