Re: FVWM: appearance

On Wed, 2 Jan 2019, Martin Cermak wrote:

> I don't think there is any difference in how fvwm looks in your 
> screenshots.  What differs is the appearance of your File Manager.

I tend to agree. In fact I was puzzled by your screen dumps, since they 
contained only part of the screen with a specific (non-fvwm) application 
(a file manager which as such is unknown to me).

The only things which are responsibility of the window manager (fvwm) are 
the windows decors (title bar and borders) which look pretty standard (one 
is light gray and the other is almost black, but this may be because one 
of the windows was focused when taking the dump).

If you are interested in fvwm customization, you should read the man pages 
of fvwm (long and instructive but not easy) and of your file manager 
whatever it is called, and find out WHERE their configuration file is 
stored.

For fvwm, the usual personal configuration file is ~/.fvwm/.fvwm2rc but if 
you do not find one for you, it may be using some "system default". On my 
opensuse this should be  /etc/X11/fvwm2/system.fvwm2rc, which I believe is 
what one sees for a fresh new account.

fvwm is highly customizable but luckily all configuration can reside in a 
SINGLE file (you can get some ideas of my experience with fvwm in
http://sax.iasf-milano.inaf.it/~lucio/WWW/Opinions/window.html)


Concerning other applications, I cannot predict. If it were a good-behaved 
X11 application (which nowadays somebody may consider old fashioned), its 
configuration will be controlled by a number of resources with syntaxes 
like

Rxvt*cursorColor: yellow
the.normalFont: -*-Terminal-Bold-R-Narrow--*-140-*-*-C-*-ISO8859-1
the.colorCyan: #00fafa
*VT100*wideFont1: -misc-fixed-medium-r-normal-*-18-120-100-100-c-180-iso10646-1
*ScrollBar:        on

These resources can reside in a file ~/.Xdefaults common to all 
applications (in this case the resource is usually prefixed with the 
capitalized name of the application) or in an application specific file 
(whose name depends on the application but usually is either a dot-file 
with the name of the application, e.g. ~/.rclock for rclock, or the 
capitalized name of the application, e.g. ~/XTerm for xterm).

It is also possible that there is no user file and it uses some system 
configuration in some system place (application dependent, see man page). 
The user file can be created only with the items which you want to 
override.

It is also possible to have alternate user configuration files, and "pass" 
them to a particular instance of the application. This might in general 
occur in two ways:

- one is to pass the name of the file as an argument to the application
   in a way which is application dependent, e.g.

   xterm -class XTermLin  will read from the file XTermLin

- another one is to use the general resource manager to read the
   specific user file before invoking the application, e.g.

   edit:    aliased to xrdb -merge ~/edit0.x ; xthe !* &
   edit1:   aliased to xrdb -merge ~/edit1.x ; xthe !* &

   edit or edit1 invoke the same editor but they pre-load a different
   resource file (in this case with different background colours etc.)

If the application is not well-behaved (somebody will say modern), it 
might use some more complex hierarchy of files, and maybe the files are 
not just plain, easily editable, text files with "resource: value" lines, 
but some more complex things (maybe xml or json or whatever else). They 
will be probably be some dot-files or dot-directories under your home, 
like .macromedia .mozilla or whatever. If you start with a fresh account 
and, after running an application for the first time, you see a new dot 
file appearing, that will be it.

-- 
Lucio Chiappetti - INAF/IASF - via Corti 12 - I-20133 Milano (Italy)
For more info : http://www.iasf-milano.inaf.it/~lucio/personal.html
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