cwm

This qxl video driver issue with #FreeBSD #QEMU VM appeared more interesting than I thought: in another boot environment #BE where I installed #Xlibre instead of #Xorg, using #qxl driver and startx in a #TTY brought up a bare X session with a #Xterm. Quitting the xterm instance successfully terminated X session and brought back TTY session, while on #Xorg quitting the session resulted in a full black screen, no tty. Switching ttys from with QEMU's sendkey failed to get any tty bacl either. If a window manager like #CWM was launched by startx, however, both Xlibre and Xorg failed with a #SegmentFault error. 2/n

#BSD #RunBSD #Unix #FOSS

Starting to use the Linux-ported version of OpenBSD cwm on Slackware as an alternative to my trusty dwm.

The interesting part is that almost nothing in my workflow changed.

I still use dmenu, tabbed + st + tmux, the same helper scripts, and the same keyboard habits. The only thing I currently miss is slstatus, which is tied to my dwm setup.

That was exactly the point of my Window Manager Agnostic Workflows article: when your launcher, scripts, and keyboard layer are independent from the window manager, switching between WMs becomes easy. The window manager changes, but the workflow remains.

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/r1w1s1/code-notes/refs/heads/main/notes/Window_Manager_Agnostic_Workflows.txt

Small, simple tools age well.

#slackware #cwm

random #unix #rice in the wild with #cwm

More #NetBSD thoughts:

I'm an #i3wm / #sway or #KDE #Plasma guy. I tried #OpenBSD's default wm for about a minute, but it was just too jarring for me. I also used #cwm for a while, and it's actually nicely configurable, but I eventually reverted to i3 on OpenBSD. I haven't tried Sway yet, but #Wayland's supposedly working in "Fish Linux" now. ;)

But #ctwm? Look, it's pretty ancient, and it's not a totally perfect fit for my worfklow, but I'm actually kinda diggin' it!

It's also probably the most attractive default GUI of any of the BSDs, considering that obsd gives you a pretty loud bright red or bright blue titlebar motif-looking thing (not knocking motif, just the primary color choice), and #FreeBSD gives you (checks notes) no GUI by default. XD

ctwm isn't quite as flexible as i3/sway, but it's just configurable enough to keep me coming back and tinkering away at it. The way the warpring function (alt+tab, in other words) works is pretty obtuse (only moving forward or backward in the window list, never re-ordering based on recency), but once I learned how to exclude windows (X11 classes or window titles) from the warpring, it became a ton more usable.

I also figured out how to enable active titlebar highlight (it drives me nuts when that's disabled or very subtle, how do you even not understand that basic tenet of usability?) and even how to assign an xpm image to the titlebar so it looks pretty.

Fun stuff!

I should post another screenshot. ;)

Today's desktop.

Looks old-school, but under the hood:
Slackware-current
Linux 7.2.4
glibc 2.44
cwm + XLibre

Without fetch (slackfetch), you probably wouldn't guess. :)

Wallpaper inspired by the geometric graphic design of Yusaku Kamekura.

#Slackware #cwm #X11 #unixporn