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FVWM-95 (2001)

fvwm95.sourceforge.net

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Re: FVWM-95 (2001)

#31

Post by LocalH »

efdee wrote: post #29
jeroenhd wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The close button has always been there, you double clicked the top left menu button. That worked all the way until Microsoft started redoing window decorations in desktop mode with Windows 8.1, and even for a short period after. This was also copied into other X window control styles. Even today, a Motif replicates the Windows 1.0-3.11 top-left menu+close button.

It actually still works to this day. Doubleclick the top left menu button (the one with the app icon) and your window closes.

This doesn't work on some newer apps, like W11 Calculator.

Re: FVWM-95 (2001)

#32

Post by tracker1 »

This and some of the other links on this topic are absolutely painful and a strain to read... DarkReader is borked and turning it off on the pages isn't much better.

Re: FVWM-95 (2001)

#33

Post by fredoralive »

efdee wrote: post #29
jeroenhd wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The close button has always been there, you double clicked the top left menu button. That worked all the way until Microsoft started redoing window decorations in desktop mode with Windows 8.1, and even for a short period after. This was also copied into other X window control styles. Even today, a Motif replicates the Windows 1.0-3.11 top-left menu+close button.

It actually still works to this day. Doubleclick the top left menu button (the one with the app icon) and your window closes.

Well, the standard window title bar still does. But with so many apps implementing their own borders, it's a bit of a crapshoot if it (or the window menu itself) will work with many apps. Even Microsoft apps sometimes forget, like Teams (of course...).

Re: FVWM-95 (2001)

#34

Post by LocalH »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #12
ajross wrote: post #6

This was a kludgey hack that never managed to land upstream, yet utterly dominated (for a brief moment) the headspace of the early linux desktop. It's funny how quickly things were moving at the time. In the mid 90's, GUI design elements were still in their infancy. Even basic stuff like "what do windows do?" was in flux. Traditional X window managers hadn't settled on anything like a regular usage model: twm was sti…

> Then Windows 95 landed like a bomb: there was a CLOSE button in the corner of the window finally! And there was a start menu and a little status bar! And that's what we all decided we wanted, really badly. So it got cloned and picked up pervasively. Basically everyone not already part of one of the X11 camps was running this. Huh? Perhaps I'm misunderstanding, but Mac windows had close buttons even as far back as S…

Amiga also had explicit close buttons very early, Mac-style (and also had full pre-emptive multitasking in its very earliest days, which happened in 1984). I've seen pre-release screenshots of revision 24.24 of Workbench that had them (for reference, v1.0 of WB was approximately revision 30, 24.24 was in the era of the Velvet prototype where the system couldn't fully bootstrap itself)

Re: FVWM-95 (2001)

#35

Post by LocalH »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #19
ajross wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mac UI as generally understood didn't involve moving windows around yet, not really[1]. "Window management" at the time was limited to the paradigm you'd see on the mac plus screen where you'd have one app window and some dialog boxes. Yes, you had a button to close it, but the paradigm didn't match the needs of the big workstation screens on which X11 evolved. [1] These were the dark days of the mac. It was falling…

On the Mac Plus and other Macs in a similar chassis, yes, there wasn't much room to move windows around, but it was still possible. Apple also released several larger Mac displays (around 16 by my count) prior to 1995, including two 21" models (in 1989 and 1991, respectively). Workstation-like window management absolutely happened on Macs in the late 80s and early 90s.

The thing that the earliest Macs lacked was multitasking (outside of desk accessories). It took until Hertzfeld created Switcher before you could run more than one full Mac app at a time, and even that required 512K RAM.

Re: FVWM-95 (2001)

#36

Post by LocalH »

ajross wrote: post #24
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the Mac Plus and other Macs in a similar chassis, yes, there wasn't much room to move windows around, but it was still possible. Apple also released several larger Mac displays (around 16 by my count) prior to 1995, including two 21" models (in 1989 and 1991, respectively). Workstation-like window management absolutely happened on Macs in the late 80s and early 90s.

(I remain amazed at how people even today will argue like this trying to avoid talking nice about MS. You're misconstruing the point, seemingly deliberately.) Sure, on $15k ($30k in 2025 dollars) Mac II's. See also the answer elsewhere about NeXTSTEP being a player in this space. No one was doing it in the consumer space, no consumer knew about that stuff, Linux consumers on their 14" 800x600 monitors sure hadn't see…

Early GEM allowed arbitrary window sizing and positioning at least within the file manager, and Apple thus sued them, because they felt they had exclusive rights to ideas that they stole from Xerox

Also, the Amiga had the window management you refer to in its earliest versions, in 1984. Amigas cost a hell of a lot less than $15,000, even packed to the brim with expansions. I grew up with the Amiga, so your assertion that "No one was doing it in the consumer space, no consumer knew about that stuff, Linux consumers on their 14" 800x600 monitors sure hadn't see it." is anecdotally false.

Re: FVWM-95 (2001)

#37

Post by pjmlp »

The original fvwm was my first window manager in Linux back in 1995, I was not a fan of the evolution into fvwm-95, though.

By then I was already into other window managers.

Re: FVWM-95 (2001)

#38

Post by dvh »

I'm on JWM since Ubuntu switched away from gnome 2x in 2012 (13 years) and my desktop is unchanged every since.

I don't update OS to relearn basic controls every 2 years, I update OS to get latest versions of apps.

Re: FVWM-95 (2001)

#40

Post by [deleted] »

deafpolygon wrote: post #28

I love lightweight desktops, like this one. I just wish we could have a lightweight browser. Seems like you spin up a chrome browser and all that saving goes out the window

[deleted]
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