TWM − Tab Window Manager for the X Window System | Hacker News Reader

TWM − Tab Window Manager for the X Window System

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72 pointsecliptik48 comments

Funny, I always knew twm as "Tom's Window Manager", which is how it was called when I learned GNU/Linux in the 90s w/XFree86.

Indeed, if one scrolls down to AUTHORS the first name is "Tom LaStrange". I guess they renamed it at some point...

I had seen it both ways but I always think "Tom" as well.

I thought the same thing, but Wikipedia says it was officially renamed in 1989...

Beginning Linux Programming circa 1999 used "Tom's (or Tabbed) Window Manager":

https://archive.org/details/beginninglinuxpr00matt/page/558/...

Glad I wasn't the only one thinking that ;)

The wikipedia page[0] has screenshots.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twm

The name brings memories. Without screenshots I can't tell if it's the same thing, but I have memories of a similarly named WM from ancient days.

I wonder if it could be used for a project I had in mind a while ago, in which a small number of apps would run maximized each one in its own page in a tab control contained in a single full screen window, without any controls, so that they can't be closed or moved by mistake, and the user would use the tabs to bring to front each one (just like pages in a web browser), then any alert, file requester or anything opened from one app would open modal and bring the relevant app to front. The purpose would be to ease the reach for apps without having to maximize, roll down, bring to front etc. as quick as possible without having to look for them. My first use case would be a music synthesizer built with a Chromebox or similar mini PC in which I would run Alpine Linux plus Yabridge and a small number of native/WINE plugins, so that it can be also used live with minimal reload time in case of problems, power outages, crashes etc. and defaulting to a well defined state.

i3 and dwm have a system of tabs/tags, which are kind of like virtual desktops/workspaces. The default keybinds are something like windows+0 to see tag 0, windows (called "mod") + 1 to see tag 1, etc. mod + f will make the current window fullscreen. It's portably possible to make a script to launch all the applications you want in their specific tags, make them fullscreen, and then disable the fullscreen switch.

This also reminds me of an article where someone explained that they replace their use of alt+tab with various keybinds because alt+tab depends on what applications are currently open and where you are, whereas a keybind can be "alt+w will open show me my web browser, or open it if it's not open". In that case too the idea was to not have to search for your windows.

TWM really had something with the "iconify" management technique - you could shepherd many more windows than are comfortable on most modern desktops, provided you were disciplined with placement. Nowadays I find myself grubbing around alt-tab entirely too much. Expose-like previewing looks sorta similar, but I don't find myself using it much because the layout is autogenerated, and it's hard to sift through your windows when they're tiny. I liked the spatial management.

I’m using it as my one and only desktop window manager since 1995. I’ve considered moving to ctwm, but the configuration is not completely compatible, and I’ve not really had any pressing need to sort it out.

twm is the best, but it's annoying that modern programs are not compatible with mouse focus (meaning whatever the mouse is pointing at is the focus for input). We've definitely given up interface speed in exchange for conformity.

I used to set it up without title bars. You had to know my personal shortcuts to use my desktop.

What do you mean? I have been using focus-follows-mouse since the late 1990s and have never noticed a program that was incompatible with it.

It's usually some commercial programs that have issues.. I was going to try it and give a more specific answer, but Ubuntu does not let me run twm. I get a blank screen when I log in with twm selected.

You very likely have twm running and no other programs. Clicking on the empty desktop ought to get you a menu.

So this is what's happening, but it's still messed up. The menus appear, but don't disappear, so pretty soon I have 20 menus all over the screen. Also no mouse pointer until I click. Also, the menu entries don't do anything (yes, I'm holding until the entry is selected, then releasing).

Anyway I tried it in vnc4server, where it does work, though you have to start it with LANG=C. But now I can't find any programs that are not working.. I'll have to use it for a while.

I never had problems wir Focus follows mouse in XWindow and like the feature very much.

I've even used a program that did the same for Windows (that sometimes had issues as the windows programs didn't expect that the activ window was not on top). I didn't remember the name of the program but this [1] sounds close.

[1] https://superuser.com/questions/954021/how-do-you-enable-foc...

I tried using focus-follows-mouse on mac (yabai allows this even without disabling SIP)... it wasn't a good experience because the menu bar is always at the top, so I was always traversing over several other apps to get to the menu bar... and I'd forget to mouse back to the app I was working in when I was done menu-ing.

Focus follows mouse is a must have for me, to really make it work it needs to be paired with "don't raise on click".

The next step in the progression to find a more usable desktop configuration is to admit that overlapping windows don't do much for you and go full tiling mode. I will admit of these three options tiling mode has the most chance to break applications. So depending on what applications you use most it may not be for you.

> I used to set it up without title bars. You had to know my personal shortcuts to use my desktop.

That's my setup in XFCE. Actually I just need two shortcuts: Alt-F4 and Alt-F9 to minify or close a window. And Alt to move the windows.

I use focus-follows-mouse (in fvwm), and the only app I can recall has any problem is Steam, in which the menus disappear if the mouse goes outside the steam window (or perhaps outside the menu, don't remember the details).

FYI: vtwm is a terrific virtual twm, and I still use it daily as my wm for linux w/ X windows. http://www.vtwm.org/

I used mwm (Motif Window Manager) for about 1 day when I started college. A friend a year older from my old high school set me up with vtwm. I spent so much time configuring my .vtwmrc file

Then I learned you could put an XBM image into your virtual desktop. I used that setup until senior year when bowman and then Afterstep came out. I just loved that NeXTSTEP look.

In the late 1990s/early 2000s, I used TWM because it was light weight, and easily customizable to have 1 px borders on windows (and no bar at the top) to maximize my screen real estate. Java Swing and TWM interacted poorly, so when LimeWire started up, the window would shrink to 3 px by 3 px. Luckily, the redraw was just slow enough that if I paid attention, it didn't take very long to find the tiny window and drag it back to a reasonable size.

It is fast, customizable and looks better than Windows 10.

How is there an entire lengthy page discussing it that doesn’t provide any screenshots?

because man pages don't have screenshots.

it's possible the person asking the question is younger than good old manpages.

Everyone born after 1972 is younger than man.

Now I feel very old.

To be fair, they could. Some VT terminals could display ReGIS and Sixel graphics.

Sixel is a terrible standard, BTW, but at least it can be easily integrated into the character flow of a page. ReGIS (and Tektronix) can't.

Yet they don't...to be fair.

I guess that if we manage to force sixel support into xterm, QTermWidget, and VTE, we'd have a reasonable excuse to add graphics support into man and info for terminals that have sixel graphics in their termcap entries.

Classic window managers and screenshots can be found on this page: http://www.xwinman.org/vtwm.php

Why would you need screenshots, when all you'd ever do is running terminal emulators?

As it seems customary.

I also need a pair of googly eyes that follow every movement of the mouse cursor and Neko, the tiny cat to sleep on it.

This is the one true way to validate DISPLAY is set correctly for remote apps.

I prefer xlogo, personally.

Android version: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.tamanegi.a...

I probably was using twm the first time I used NCSA Mosaic. A few months later Al Gore gave a speech talking about the information superhighway.

I guess since it’s a news article I assumed it was some bleeding edge implementation of something non-mainstream like a tiling window manager.

So I clicked through and was like… a couple pics would do way better at helping me understand what it was on about.

Then a reply here had a link of what looked my early 00s openbsd sparcstation desktop.

And suddenly it all made sense.

man pages don't have screenshots. They typically use a pager, but they can have formatting. Just type 'man man' in the cli without the single quotes. Online used to mean documentation provided on the local system.

X11R7.6 Manual Pages: Section 1: Commands

https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.6/doc/man/man1

Of course, there is not a reason why the manual page cannot have images and figures. The whole PIC language exists to put diagrams into things like ?roff, and it was at one time de rigueur to format the manual pages to postscript and send them to the printer. It was also common in later times to generate PS or DVI output and view that with the appropriate viewer. Honestly viewing the manual pages with a plain text pager is the new, worse-is-better method.

Most man pages give good PostScript output with "man -t". I like reading those on screen or occasionally printing manuals I refer to frequently. The main problem I've run into in recent years are man pages that use ASCII art but don't wrap that in explicit roff requests for a fixed-width font, making the result mostly unreadable outside the terminal.

tvtwm got a lot of traction, when fvwm came out. it was twm with (t)he (v)irtual desktop.

uwm did me for a long time.

INRIA had a staffer who did a LISP WM which was like a shot back to the Xerox symbolics LISP machine era. Colias Nabahoo? I think it was called Koala.

the main reason I liked (tv)twm was size. it was really tiny. Fvwm was well formulated and easy to drive but it was a memory hog.

stumpwm uses common lisp, you can attach a repl to it and change its behavior/configuration at run-time if you like that kind of thing

> StumpWM is a tiling, keyboard driven X11 Window Manager written entirely in Common Lisp.

gwm was a normal window manager. Too bad it only works on 32 bit systems.

If my browser tabs become windows, then where does that leave the address bar?

I think you're confused. Your browser tabs always sit inside a browser window; if you move one out, it creates a new window to sit in.

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