Subject: FVWM: Newcomer to fvwm with some ideas, patches and questions

From: Mark Rawling <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 29 Oct 1996 13:19:25 +1100

Hi fvwmrs,
As a newcomer, please forgive any naivety I show here about fvwm2.

I've done a fair bit of hacking on tvtwm. I fixed a few bugs, added colored,
shaped icons, fixed up color map management problems, etc. Basically,\
I know my way around WMs fairly well.

I never really liked fvwm(2). Thought the handles were ugly, can't stand the way it
treats icons (can't tell it where to place them, doesn't line them up properly,
truncates the names, hilites them in strange colors, etc)

But I must have the audio!!! I love it. App based style are brilliant too. A great idea.

So, I've done a couple of things....

(A) I fixed a bug in FvwmAudio.c, so now it plays the right sounds at the right time
    (I'm using the windows Utopia sound scheme - sounds fantastic - don't get me wrong,
    I detest PCs, but the idea of sound schemes is cool - cursor schemes too)

(B) I changed the resize function so that it does opaque resizes. This is great, just like
    opaquemove - when the window gets bigger than the opaque size limit it jumps into 
    rubber band mode, then drops back to opaque again if the window shrinks back down.
    It's fantastic - I highly recommend opaque resize under X.

    As part of this I slightly improved the appearance of the rubber bands - a trivial thing,
    but I didn't like the thicker border on the middle third of each each XOR'd outline
    edge. Have a close look people - it's weird (an artifact of the XOR drawing method used).

(C) I did my own handle/border drawing code. I think it looks great. Nice and simple and very
    functional. Similar to windows 95 (shudder), but better. Basically I eliminated the
    internal shadows/relief drawn on the handles. Easier on the eyes. Less cluttered. Really
    nice. But this is a religious argument of course, so I'm not forcing it on anyone. 
    However I would like to suggest this ... If it hasn't been done already I could remove
    the limit on the number of styles. To facilitate all sorts of handles I would suggest
    that instead of having Handles vs Borders, vs MWMBorders, etc, etc. We could have
    a single handle style argument. Eg HandleStyle fvwm (default), HandleStyle simple (mine)
    HandleStyle MWM, etc. Ultimately, users could define their own handle style. We could let
    them specify internal relief, external relief, etc, independently.

(D) In my fvwm2rc file I have predefined 3 or 4 pixmap title buttons for my favorite apps. 
    So for xterm, button 1 is a mini xterm, etc. It looks fabulous, but I'm limited to
    less than 5 (Button 9 is a catch all, for unspecified apps).
    So I have Style "*" NoButton 1, NoButton 3, NoButton 5, NoButton 7
    and then  Style "xterm" NoButton 9, Button 1 (to change the catch all into the mini-xterm)
    I think it would be good
    if buttons could be specified on a per application basis. If not their function, then 
    at least their appearance. If that's too much, then how about an optional TitleIcon - 
    just like a normal Icon, except it sits in the title bar, first button on the left.

Does anyone like any of these ideas??? If so, let me know. I can post the audio patch, the
opaque resize patch, and my simple borders patch if anyone's interested. But
note that the borders patch redefines MWMBorder to mean my simple borders, so it really
needs to be done in conjunction with extra style capability to be generally useful.

BTW, if you're wondering, my weird? tastes come from using tvtwm (not MS Windows). And yes,
I think tvtwm is a great WM, but it doesn't have the audio. And no, my borders don't just
look like tvtwm - they look better - like a cross b/w tvtwm and fvwm (and yes, a bit similar
to Windows 95)

Mark

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