Ok! That makes complete sense to me now, thanks. I think I already have swm around here somewhere...just never tried it in DSL before.
It's my opinion that Fluxbox 0.1.14 has been showing its age, as there seems to be an increase over the last few years in the number of window managers that provide a more robust environment while remaining relatively small or even smaller. Newer versions of Fluxbox are sadly suffering from both a much larger size and noticeable slowdown. It is still among my favorites, but I no longer consider it suitable for old hardware.
I'm looking forward to seeing how well dwm and dfm play together. I didn't care for the way xtdesk worked with dwm, but I don't care for xtdesk in itself =o)
EDIT: So far I like dfm much better than xtdesk, which is probably an obvious conclusion. There are things that really bug me about it, though, so I will probably use it only in a pinch (e.g. no extensions available at the moment), and for vanilla testing of extensions. <bombast> I have no love for desktop icons; the way I tend to work (fullscreen apps in a tiled wm or several overlapping apps in a non-tiling wm) forces me to have to move windows all the time in order to access the icons. This is pointless delay and effort when hotkeys and menus are generally always accessible regardless of what is on the desktop. Fortunately you don't have to use the desktop icons with dfm. There are still several useful features in this program. I'm having a problem, at least in my personal dfm build, with opening directories in structure view. It worked the first time, and then again once a bit later, but every other time I've tried it the view flashed and disappeared. There was no error message to help find the trouble. Maybe this isn't a problem with the DSL version? There is no documentation on the use of hotkeys. I had to push some random keys before discovering that Ctrl+q will close a window. There doesn't seem to be any way to edit the right-click menu, as in adding application launchers to it? Also doesn't seem to be a way to navigate directories using a single window. I haaate that behavior. Maybe I just haven't found the right switch yet. I was going to complain about .dfminfo being an unreadable binary format, but i just discovered it's gzipped, so that's cool =) </bombast>
I need to experiment with it more before I make a final opinion, but so far my personal choice would be to keep my current setup of using dwm, aterm, and mc for my desktop environment. The dfm/swm combo is still an excellent choice for a small but usable starting point in DSL, though. I really think it will be an improvement over fluxbox-0.1 and xtdeskI would suggest that you download 4.0rc5 and at the minimum read the getting started doc. It has much information about the shortcuts, minimizing number of windows opened and general use of dfm currently in DSL. Much of which has been contributed by many who have already been using the release candidates.
I am planning to modify some of dfm's default behavior.
I know that some will always prefer tiling window managers and no icons.
Personally I use dfm/swm and use the Ctrl-Tab to switch to different desktops, so I have easy access to icons in a minimal 20 processes running upon boot system.
FYI swm is 26k, jwm is 113k and fluxbox 589k + fluxter 86k + /usr/share/fluxbox
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Personally I use dfm/swm and use the Ctrl-Tab to switch to different desktops
That's the way I've been using dfm with dwm. At this time I'm still debating whether or not keeping the icons is worth it when I can access applications more quickly with hotkeys or dmenu.
One important thing I forgot to mention, though... It's been so long since I've used drag-and-drop for *anything* that I forgot that it can be a very useful feature. I haven't quite figured out how it handles dragging one file onto another yet, but I'm sure that will come.
I feel like I'm needing to relearn the mouse-driven approach I left behind a few years ago =o)unless somebody knows of another way, i've been thinking of processing .dfminfo to grid-align the desktop icons. i was thinking of a c binary but much rather somebody else talented do in lua. . come to think of it, much rather somebody else do it period. Eariler in this thread I wrote about making DSL more open to other window managers. If I had the luxury of only supporting unionfs it would be quite easy. In fact, I am showing my frustration of supporting so many features, editions, and operating modes of DSL.
Nevertheless, starting with v4.1 I am making the window manager a more open process. I have gotten rid the the restrictive case statment in dsl-config and .xinitrc. I have created support for a window manager include file processed by .xinitrc. I have tested this with a simple pwm.dsl loaded at boot time with only using desktop=pwm and it is working fine. Of course the included window managers work the same as before. I did remove swm.
This new process should make it easier to boot into other window managers without overwriting .xinitrc.
[EDIT] I should add the include is not required. Only need it the wm needs a mouse pointer, or starts slit or dockapps or other specifics.
