Interview With Tom LaStrange (The T In twm)

VSarkiss writes "A very nice (and rare) interview with Tom LaStrange, the developer of twm, is on Linuxplanet. Fascinating how some of the most useful programs are developed by one person, just because they wanted something better. In this case, Tom wanted something better than the truly-awful uwm, rumored to be an abbreviation for 'ugly window manager.'"

Re:TWM

Actually, twm is not particularly light. Fvwm started out as a version of twm with certain data structures rewritten to take less memory. This made fvwm more useful on 4Mbyte machines. Fvwm was originally called the Flimsy Virtual Window Manager - 'flimsy' being managementspeak for 'small and compact'. But like KDE, they soon deliberately forgot what the first letter stood for.

This is all IIRC of course. But I'm fairly sure that twm is not the lightest window manager out there; just relatively small compared to monstrosities like E :-).

UWM?

There's something uglier than twm? I'd hardly credit it.

Doing a quick google search, I turned up the Unix Desktop Environment's window manager, which looks rather nice, but hunting a bit more I found the uwm source code [plig.org] at, surprise surprise, the PLiG window manager page [plig.org].

Unfortunately it doesn't compile immediately here on RedHat 6.0, (conflicting definitions of wchar_t in glibc and XFree86, of all things), so I can't post screenshots. If someone *does* manage to get it to compile and work (any experts on porting from X10 here?) why not post a reply and keep us all informed? :)

hmm.

I went looking for some screenshots of TWM as I had never used it (went from CLI to Enlightenment.. :). I found this page with lots of screenshots [plig.org].

Of particular interest was this [plig.org]. Is it just me, or does this stike you as vaguely reminiscent of BeOS?

Rami
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TWM

A huge advantage that TWM has over the others WM is his lightness :
You can use TWM/X-VGA server with no problem on any old laptop. It is damn' stable and especially saved many computosaurus from the dust-bin, here.
(when someone visits our firewall rooms, he actually think he is in a computer museum ;-)
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Re:UWM?

Unfortunately it doesn't compile immediately here on RedHat 6.0, (conflicting definitions of wchar_t in glibc and XFree86, of all things), so I can't post screenshots. If someone *does* manage to get it to compile and work (any experts on porting from X10 here?) why not post a reply and keep us all informed? :)

You can simulate it for purposes of a screen shot pretty easally. Arange your windows in a normal window manager. Kill the window manager. Take a screen shot.

UWM has (or had) no title bars, no window borders, no icon box, no icons, no menu bar, no on screen hint of any kind that it was running. Well, except when you were actually draggin or resizing a window, it gave the rubberband, and maybe a little text (I havn't used it for about a decade!). I think it had manus when you clicked the root window, but they were in the fixed font, and plain black on white with the circle cursor.

TWM really was the Enlightment of it's day. I fiddled with config files for hours and hours. In fact I hacked it to use M4 to preprocess the config files so I could waste even more time tweeking config files (as far as I can tell the FVWM M4 code was at least inspired by mine as it sets all the same macro values).