Twm
Summary |
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This wiki page details installation and configuration of the twm window manager under Parabola. |
Twm is a window manager for X11. It is a small program, being built against Xlib rather than using a widget library, and as such, it is very light on system resources. Though simple, it is highly configurable; fonts, colours, border widths, title bar buttons, etc. can all be set by the user.
Contents
1 Twm creation and name
Twm was written by Tom LaStrange, a developer who was frustrated by the limitations of uwm (Ultrix Window Manager)[[1], the only window manager around when X11 was first released. Twm supplanted uwm as the default window manager supplied with X11 from the X11R4 release in 1989[2].
Twm has stood for Tom's Window Manager, Tab Window Manager and more recently Timeless Window Manager[3].
2 Installation
Twm is part of the Parabola official repositories and is provided by the package xorg-twm.
3 Start twm with X
In order for twm to be run as your window manager, edit the file ~/.xinitrc so the final line is:
exec twm
If you now type:
startx
at the command prompt, X will start using twm as its window manager.
If you would like to configure X (and twm) to start on boot (or when you login), read the wiki page Start X at boot to find out how.
4 Configuration (editing your .twmrc)
By default, twm looks very dated and unintuitive. By editing the file ~/.twmrc, you can customize twm to make it more friendly.
5 Resources
- The twm man page gives full details of the commands which can be used in your ~/.twmrc file. It can be viewed online[4] or accessed once twm is installed by typing the following at a command prompt:
man twm
- Many ~/.twmrc files have been posted online[5]. The site xwinman[6] has several ~/.twmrc files with screenshots which might provide inspiration. A Google search for "twmrc" can be used to find new ideas[7].
- More information about twm can be found on the twm Wikipedia page[8].
- There is a patched version, not in the repositories, with updated features such as transparency. A description and build script is available on the xorg mailing list.[9] It can be tried out by installing xcompmgr, running the build script, putting the resulting twm and dot.twmrc files in a convenient directory, and editing the ~/.xinitrc file so that the last two lines are
xcompmgr -o 0.3 -c -r 8 -t -10 -l -12 & /path-to-directory/twm -visual TrueColor -depth 32 -f /path-to-directory/dot.twmrc
6 References
- Proffitt, Brian. "From the Desktop: Tom LaStrange Speaks!", LinuxPlanet, February 6, 2001. Retrieved October 22, 2009.
- "UWM (computing)", Wikipedia. Retrieved October 22, 2009.
- "Twm", Wikipedia. Retrieved October 22, 2009.
- "Twm man page", linux.die.net. Retrieved October 22, 2009.
- "Sample .twmrc file", physics.wm.edu. Retrieved October 22, 2009.
- "Window Managers for X: TWM/VTWM", xwinman.org. Retrieved October 22, 2009.
- "Google search for twmrc", Google. Retrieved October 22, 2009.
- "Twm", Wikipedia. Retrieved October 22, 2009.
- Kask, Eeri. "TWM -- Revised Edition -- Again", xorg mailing list, January 3, 2010.