Re: Progress! But further help needed for ctwm on Ubuntu

Am 12.02.23 um 15:51 schrieb [email protected]:
> ...
> I guess I have to find the location of the ctwm specification and start editing
> it to include the actions I need. It's not located at ~/.ctwmrc where I expected
> to find it. The startup ~/.ctwmrc file from my previous use of ctwm on Fedora
> was ignored.
> ...
> In case this provides a clue:
> ...


Dear Aaron,

at first, I guessed what you are seeing are the defaults
built-into ctwm *source* code:
	[ https://www.ctwm.org/download.html ]
	[ https://launchpad.net/ctwm ]
	[ https://bazaar.launchpad.net/~ctwm/ctwm/trunk/files ]
 .

BUT: Looking into --> "system.ctwmrc",
what you are describing is an absolutely crippled sub-set
of that sensible-selected default to get started -
including xterm, of course :-)

Running Gentoo since ~ 2002,
I have recently abandoned X11
and switched to Wayland -> wlroots -> dwl,
but my old ctwm config file still resides at

#--->     ~/.ctwmrc

According to "man ctwm" :

   --file=filename, -f filename

	This option specifies the name of the startup file to use.
	ctwm will first try to load filename.num, where num is the screen number.
	If it fails, it will try to load filename.

	By default, ctwm will look in the user’s home directory for files
	named .ctwmrc.num, .ctwmrc, .twmrc.num, or .twmrc
	(where num is a screen number).


Remembering your Name from FAW Ulm times (1989 - 2000),
to do you a favour, I re-emerged the package x11-wm/ctwm-4.0.3 :

# equery files ctwm
  * Searching for ctwm ...
  * Contents of x11-wm/ctwm-4.0.3:
/usr
/usr/bin
/usr/bin/ctwm
/usr/share
/usr/share/doc
/usr/share/doc/ctwm-4.0.3
/usr/share/doc/ctwm-4.0.3/CHANGES.md.bz2
/usr/share/doc/ctwm-4.0.3/README.html
/usr/share/doc/ctwm-4.0.3/README.md.bz2
/usr/share/doc/ctwm-4.0.3/ctwm.1.html
/usr/share/examples
/usr/share/examples/ctwm
/usr/share/examples/ctwm/system.ctwmrc   <-------
/usr/share/man
/usr/share/man/man1
/usr/share/man/man1/ctwm.1.bz2

	- and that's it.


My recommendation:

0.)
- Just "delete" (= move-away) *all* your former ctwm config files!

1.)
Fresh restart: should unconditionally give you meaningful defaults mentioned above!

2.)
- Copy the above to your home directory
- re-name it to ~/.ctwmrc
- do any *minor* modification
- check this has been incorporated

If this does not get recognized:
Probability is *very* high
that your problems are *not* related to ctwm in any way.


In that case,
I would rather re-consider reading Steve's Mail again.

These Block-Buster-Distributions are by no means friendly or supportive
neither to "old-fashined" X11 SW nor to good old "K.I.S.S." principles.
They favour GNOME and KDE; XFCE already is only of secondary interest;
everything else: an "also-ran".

! Gentoo, Arch, as well as their derivatives rule a completely different approch :-)

! Steve is right:  Devuan, as "KISS, but almost-all-inclusive", comes 'closest'.


All the best

Kind regards from Munich, Germany

Manfred        < same old age ;-) ... >


P.S.:

Zoom does *not* depend upon blown-up Distro desktops:

###   Gentoo:

# equery list -p    net-im/zoom
  * Searching for zoom in net-im ...
[-P-] [ ~] net-im/zoom-5.13.3.651-r1:0
[-P-] [ ~] net-im/zoom-5.13.4.711:0


###   Arch Linux:

Package Details: zoom 5.13.7-1