Graham’s TWM page has been around for like two decades or so and still isn’t even remotely as old as TWM itself, and in 2021 they published an updated version with even more information, tips, and tricks for TWM. The Tab Window Manager finds its origins in the lat 1980s, and has been the default window manager for the X Windowing System for a long time, now, too. Yet, few people know it exists – how many people even know X has a default window manager? – and even fewer people know you can actually style it, too.
OK, so TWM is fairly easy to configure but alot of people, upon seeing the default config, scream ‘Ugh, thats awful!’ and head off to the ports tree or their distro sources in search of the latest and greatest uber desktop environment.
There are some hardcore TWM fans and mimimalists however who stick around and get to liking the basic feel of TWM. Then they start to mod it and create their own custom dekstop. All part of the fun in Unix :).
Graham’s TWM page
I’ll admit I have never used TWM properly, and didn’t know it could be themed at all. I feel very compelled to spend some time with it now, because I’ve always liked the by-now classic design where the right-click desktop menu serves as the central location for all your interactions with the system. There are quite a few more advanced, up-to-date forks of TWM as well, but the idea of sticking to the actual default X window manager has a certain charm.
I almost am too afraid to ask, because the answer on OSAlert to these sorts of questions is almost always “yes” – do we have any TWM users in the audience? I’m extremely curious to find out if TWM actually has a reason to exist at this point, or if, in 2024, it’s just junk code in the X.org source repository, because I’m looking at some of these screenshots and I feel a very strong urge to give it a serious go.
I had a boss who used twm+Xvnc+a lot of xterms to manage a fleet of Linux/Solaris boxes, he must have had like 50 little iconized xterm windows organized all over the desktop and knew where each host and could locate it easily by muscle memory. It actually worked pretty well!
Once upon a time, when I my 20s, I used to fully customize my desktop. Window Maker or Openbox, custom docks, custom scripts to run thing, custom icon packs, etc…
Now, 40 years old, I’m just too grump to do that and use an vanilla KDE. I change the wallpaper, at best.
One good thing in twm/fvwm family is that you write one config file and it works for ages.
I personally updated my ~/.fvwmrc like 10 times since 1997.
Funny how WordPress shows “related posts” from 2 decades ago.
I am very happy with Openbox and struggling to find a good replacement. Not a huge fan of fade ins/fade outs and eye candy. I just want a nice program launcher and, with customisations, Openbox does window tiling quite well.
vtwm is my daily driver. ‘v’ for ‘virtual desktop’
ie. the display window shows just part of the entire “desk surface”.
very simple, nothing fancy, very handy.
very flexible (if you like editing a config file).
The Athena widget set was not ment to be used in large scale applications at all. It was just an example widget set.
I’m sure I used twm at university on some systems. Later, I discovered lwm (https://stuff.mit.edu/afs/athena/project/windowmgr/src/lwm/lwm.html) which I now see was inspired by 8 1/2 for Plan 9. These window managers were also useful for lightweight VNC sessions when X11 sessions weren’t possible.
I’m a daily user of ctwm, which is basically twm with virtual desktops and a few extras – the configuration files are nearly entirely compatible. We recently made ctwm the default (over twm) in NetBSD using a small modification of my default configuration. It’s quite a popular window manager still. I’m on the ctwm mailing list and it gets a few posts a week from different people.
CTWM gang!
Super portable all across *nix systems I have encountered and I have been using the same baseline config file since uni days (with continuous adjustments).
This is nice, I can’t believe I never saw this page before.
I used twm many times over the decades. Mostly to get to something else. IIRC it was the default wm in FreeBSD for a long time. I customized it once but never used it for longer than a day or so.
The one that I customized the most was the fvwm that is default on OpenBSD. Even by fvwm standards, that is an ancient version. I made it look really nice and usable with good colors on a Retina MacBook Pro and I was happy with that setup until life happened and took it away.
I am surprised to see somebody still using Seamonkey. I think it doesn’t receive security updates often anymore and could potentially be dangerous to use daily.
It will be a shame when X is finally gone. I took a few weeks back in December to customize sway but it’s nothing as fancy or unique as some of the old custom desktops we used to see.
I’m one of the X.Org maintainers who keeps twm alive, and even I’ve not regularly used it in over 30 years. (At the time I switched from twm to ctwm for the multiple virtual workspaces – since then I moved to CDE when I started working at Sun, then GNOME when Sun started working on adopting it for Solaris, and I still use GNOME as my primary desktop today, only running twm when I need to for testing.)
I’ve been mostly using Linux now for ages. I remember about 20-25 years ago that whenever I saw TWM I would panic and think “oh, I REALLY broke something this time!” Over the past few years I’ve been dabbling with NetBSD which defaults to CTWM (a very close relative to TWM). With just a few minor configuration tweaks, I was impressed with just how usable it is. I’m not going to start using it as my daily-driver desktop, but without having to drastically change my workflow, it certainly gets the job done and isn’t bad to use at all, which really is saying something for a piece of software with a memory footprint that can be measured in KB vs GB.