Man...I had such great hopes for Fvwm...pager that rocked, everything super customizable. I spent two weeks awash in a sea of documentation and config files. The tip-off should of been that this was big in the Linux world circa 2002. I didn't really mind the motif look...it was kind of old-school. I got the colors all set up nice. One thing super great was I could finally set my file manager window titles right "/usr/share/doc - File Manager" instead of just "doc", which I hate.

I really did like a lot about Fvwm. It has some great ideas. But, while researching it, I found some comment to the effect that "although I love Fvwm, I decided to switch to Fluxbox so that I don't spend all my time configuring my wm and get some real work done" and damn, was that head on!

Coming up next: "my nightmare that was writing a Gtk theme"

hey Snap, I meant Openbox is stable and finished...that's not so bad. But Fluxbox is still being developed, so that's nice too.

regarding Fluxbox's speed, you might want to try this in your init file:

session.screen0.menuMode: Click
session.autoRaiseDelay: 0

This give a memory comparison of the various wm's:
https://l3net.wordpress.com/2013/03/17/a-memory-comparison-of-light-linux-desktops/

haha...well, I don't think it's going to happen! Nice dream, but it's too hard as it is configuring Debian for myself.

@PackRat - done 

@Snap - have you ever run two instances of tint2? I was going to look into that...one as pager, one as task manager

Hello, at the request of PackRat, I'm posting how to use bbpager with Flux:

install bbpager and wmctrl and put the following two lines in the startup file before exec fluxbox:

(sleep 1s && bbpager) &
(sleep 2s && wmctrl -r bbpager -b add,below) &

screenshot (upper left hand corner) http://vsido.org/index.php?topic=1014.msg11748#msg11748
colors are a little dim in the screenshot, but it works very nicely

Thanks Jedi. Actually, at one point I was dreaming of starting my own distro and those two tutorials were part of my masterplan. The idea was to set up a distro that was designed with eye towards a well thought out user interface and making all the wonderful tools available in Linux help you get work done.

<rant> I mean, too many distros are focused on eye candy to lure in the new users...bouncing icons and spinning desktops are fun for about four minutes. I was just checking out Xubuntu and sure...a light gray centered window title on a lighter gray background looks pretty and all...but when I have 5 windows open and I'm trying to focus, I want the title on the left so I can stack the windows and I want good contrast so I can read the titles, damn it! </rant>

my two favorite command line programs are locate and tree. I see you have mlocate, so tree would be my suggestion

before I joined I would google some Fluxbox topic and land at the Vsido forums. Fluxbox's wiki seems to need more work but they have great man pages. Here's a fun fact:

Openbox 3.4.11 released - last update: Feb 08, 2010 - 7:49 pm UTC
http://openbox.org/wiki/Openbox:News

Fluxbox 1.3.7 - Bam! Zero Bugs!!11! - Sun Feb 08 12:57:55 UTC 2015
http://www.fluxbox.org/news/

exactly five years later! of course, it just means Openbox is stable...there are lots of benefits to running Openbox...written in C, smaller and faster, etc.

@VastOne

well...I'm down...that's why I'm here...to have a little fun and contribute something.

@jedi

thanks! the problem is...those were my two big ideas...now, I need to think up some more big ideas!

@PackRat

bbpager...actually, I wanted to find out suggestions on pagers. bbpager is OK, but the version in the repos doesn't seem to support transparency. To get it to work, I installed wmctrl and put the following two lines in my startup file before exec fluxbox

(sleep 1s && bbpager) &
(sleep 2s && wmctrl -r bbpager -b add,below) &

Hi Jedi and thanks for the welcome. That's really, really nice...I don't even try to do something so great. I like Cinnamon's whole start button setup for easy access to applications. I used Gnome 2 when I first started with Ubuntu years ago...it used to do a full text index of all my files once a week and slow everything down to a crawl! Or, maybe that was Ubuntu's fault.

thanks VastOne and Snap!

one of those things that takes you a couple of months to figure out...then you are like "oh damn!"

my setup is really stripped down...



the photo is by a famous Japanese photographer Takuma Nakahira, a contemporary of Daidō Moriyama. One thing to note is that I tried to set the image to the "visual center" which is slightly higher than center ;-)

For the gradients I used orangered4 - orangered3 and grey20 - grey15...I tried to use X colors as much as possible.