100 tweaking X window managers

Suggestions from a variety of sources: First, some pages about window managers. Google "X tweak" to find about 566,000 other suggestions.

If you use Microsoft Windows, your window manager is a program called Explorer — not Internet Explorer, but its antecedent (Desktop) Explorer. You can replace it, same as you do an X window manager. Conceptually and logistically, it may be easier to make changes among X window managers first, once you have one.

Many window managers are made to go with GNOME or KDE, which are look-and-feel or desktop packages. You might have noticed GNOME as one of the options we didn't choose in setting up Cygwin. That would make for a heavy load, not on Linux alone, but rather on Cygwin on top of Microsoft Windows. Check the screenshots link on X.Cygwin page to see some of the possibilities.

The window managers we used last week were openbox (check out the Configuration topic of the Docs page), fvwm, and twm, all of which can be reconfigured until you run out of time. Twm is probably the easiest to start with; the twm link here includes other people's twmrc files that you can study.

Other relative lightweights (compared to those that run on Gnome and Kde) include WindowMaker (wm) and Blackbox. (Blackbox is one of the possible replacements for Microsoft Explorer.)

Your task for today: find the configuration files for one of the window managers, make changes to it (e.g., make it start up with certain programs [shell, clock], change its default menu, change the desktop), show the instructor your results.