Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

FVWM-95 (2001)

fvwm95.sourceforge.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 105 posts

Re: FVWM-95 (2001)

#51

Post by cosmic_cheese »

xnorswap wrote: post #47
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Did the mac close actually close? I have memories of being endlessly frustrated trying to use an iMac because "close" would just hide the window. We've gone full circle, and now everything in windows likes to treat close as "minimize to system tray", but back in win9x era, the expectation was that close was "terminate the application".

With exception to single window utility programs, Mac windows have always truly closed with the resources taken by the represented document being freed and all that. The windows weren't hidden. It's just that closing the window ≠ quitting the application… the program can remain in memory even if it has no documents loaded.

This serves a couple of purposes: first, documents open more quickly (particularly when the program is loaded from a slow spinning HDD, floppy, etc) since the program doesn't need to be reloaded, and second, new document creation flows and non-document functions can be accessed without having a document open or requiring the developer to create a bespoke "home screen" UI that serves that purpose since the full menubar is accessible as long as the app is foregrounded.

Re: FVWM-95 (2001)

#52

Post by projektfu »

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…

A Radius two page display was just not that expensive. Neither was a Mac II. By 1992, you could buy a Mac IIci for $2900 and a TPD for $900-1100. You couldn't buy it on your allowance but it was reasonably common.

The finder was always a multi-window interface.

I just don't know where your memory is from.

Re: FVWM-95 (2001)

#53

Post by thesuitonym »

hackthemack wrote: post #9

That type of webpage style was quite common in the late 90s. Compare it to https://www.circlemud.org/ I think the html editors of the time defaulted to some of style we now find quaint/quirky.

It was just the style at the time. There weren't a lot of HTML editors, even in 2001, and those that existed typically defaulted to an entirely blank page. People mostly wrote web pages in something like an emacs, vim, or notepad. Dreamweaver and Frontpage existed back then, but DW was only really popular with professionals, and nobody ever really used FP.

This style was a popular choice because it was easy to write, and could be displayed by just about any web browser. Compatibility and low resource usage was important back then.

Re: FVWM-95 (2001)

#54

Post by stevekemp »

BeetleB wrote: post #11

I have fond memories of FVWM. I don't know where this was (Slashdot?), but back in the mid 2000's, someone posted a "Why are people not using FVWM? It's one of the most flexible window managers?", and linked to various people's FVWM setup. This led to a lot of folks (including me) switching to FVWM. I used it until switching to AwesomeWM around 2011. You can see some (fairly old!) screenshots here: https://fvwm-theme…

I used it until I switched to GNOME2 at some point, and I also have fond memories. Just seeing the title of this post recalled the desktops I had had over the years.

My linux days started around 95/96, and I was always using low-resource environments due to necessity. Other than FVWM95 the other system I recall using for a long long time was IceWM which was something I switched to around 1999/2000.

Re: FVWM-95 (2001)

#55

Post by xnorswap »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #51
xnorswap wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did the mac close actually close? I have memories of being endlessly frustrated trying to use an iMac because "close" would just hide the window. We've gone full circle, and now everything in windows likes to treat close as "minimize to system tray", but back in win9x era, the expectation was that close was "terminate the application".

With exception to single window utility programs, Mac windows have always truly closed with the resources taken by the represented document being freed and all that. The windows weren't hidden. It's just that closing the window ≠ quitting the application… the program can remain in memory even if it has no documents loaded. This serves a couple of purposes: first, documents open more quickly (particularly when the pro…

"closing the window ≠ quitting the application"

See this is what I mean, that's completely alien to a MS Windows user in the mid-nineties.

Re: FVWM-95 (2001)

#56

Post by thesuitonym »

slashdave wrote: post #43
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…

I ran Motif from a terminal, and used command lines to bring up windows. Windows 95 felt like a toy in comparison, not to mention PC performance was pretty sad when compared to a high-end unix workstation. To each their own I guess.

It's not really fair to compare a bottom-of-the-barrel PC to a high-end unix workstation though. The high-end Windows boxes were running Windows NT 3.51, and later NT 4, and there just weren't many of them. NT 4 wasn't quite there yet, but it had a lot of what was good from the Windows 95 interface, but on a real, enterprise-grade OS.

It's almost a shame Microsoft clung to DOS compatibility for so long, that probably kept a lot of power users from seeing what Windows could do. But on the other hand, it's probably a good thing because it kept Unix popular and gave Linux and BSD room to grow.

Re: FVWM-95 (2001)

#57

Post by thesuitonym »

xnorswap wrote: post #55
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With exception to single window utility programs, Mac windows have always truly closed with the resources taken by the represented document being freed and all that. The windows weren't hidden. It's just that closing the window ≠ quitting the application… the program can remain in memory even if it has no documents loaded. This serves a couple of purposes: first, documents open more quickly (particularly when the pro…

"closing the window ≠ quitting the application" See this is what I mean, that's completely alien to a MS Windows user in the mid-nineties.

It's just a different set of expectations. The original versions of the Mac OS should almost be thought of as a multiple-document interface. Consider the web browser you're reading this in. You wouldn't expect closing a single tab or window to quit the whole application, would you? That's really what was going on in early Mac system software. Go to infinite-mac and open Mac Paint on a System 1.0 machine. It becomes very obvious when you open the app, and all of the Finder windows and desktop icons disappear.

This is only confusing in comparison to Windows though. If you used graphical DOS applications, it was the exact same experience. You open the app, and can interact with your documents, but closing a document doesn't necessarily close the app.

Even Photoshop on Windows of the day worked the same way. When you opened Photoshop, a parent window would open that was the app. Closing documents left the app open, unless you also closed the parent window.

Re: FVWM-95 (2001)

#58

Post by bandrami »

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

There are plenty of very light browsers you just have to give up on having a JS engine (which honestly can be a kind of nice way to surf, but probably not a good idea for work)

Re: FVWM-95 (2001)

#60

Post by bandrami »

trinix912 wrote: post #7
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…

It was actually NeXTSTEP that introduced the familiar "Windows 9x" 3D control appearance and close buttons on the top right. The first versions were released around '88.

I love that interface. If I ever get a lodpi monitor again I'm going straight back to Windowmaker.
Post reply on HN