Some screenshots
If you had asked me "what's your favourite
Linux window manager?" some time ago, I would have surely answered
FVWM, the Feline Virtual Window Manager. It
takes a lot of time for configuration but, at the end, the result is
wonderful. It's very very minimal but essential at the same time. Lots of
things have changed since I have got first inspired from
Fvwm-Crystal,
Ikaro and
Gulivert works.
You can try it (before unpacking in your
home, rename your ~/.fvwm/ directory or it will be overwritten).
All you need is Fvwm version 2.5.14 or newer. All the icons, wallpaper and
other eye-candy stuffs are not shipped with the package because of their
licenses. Anyway, you can easily grab them from these links:
DeviantArt (mainly for icons),
Digital Art (for wallpapers),
PixelGirl (for icons and wallpapers) and
IconFactory (icons only).
At now, as my spare time shortens, I can't
spend so much hours trying to give a better look to my desktop. All in all,
Fvwm is very hard to tune because of its odd configuration syntax; moreover
eye candy stuffs are always static and there's no animation support. I'm
looking forward to the 3.x version being released as I hope developers
write some
new interesting features.
Until then, I'm using E17, an heavy
developed window manager currently available via CVS only. E17 has some
nice features, like those wonderful effects on the iBar and menu: the
strange icon in the bottom toolbar of the screenshot is due to a graphical
effect that makes icons pulse when mouse hovers on them.
E17 itself and its libraries (mainly
Edje and
Evas)
are really innovative because of the absolute separation of the graphical,
interface aspects from the inner functional behaviour. This is quite useful
since the code developer is not required to have any graphic skill when
he/she writes down the application code; and this is true even for the
graphic artist, who can change the theme of a GUI without any knowledge of
programming and without re-building the whole application.
Many themes exist at now for Enlightenment, but the one I prefer is Milky (look at Gulivert's site). I recently did some hack to its code in order to add few eye candy effects and make some experiments with Edje: I called this theme Bismy, in honor of the wonderful Pietra di Bismantova. At now it doesn't differ so much from Milky, but I'm planning to work on it in the future. Available from here (right click on the link and then save as).
Last changes: May 2nd, 2007
