Eric's Big Blue-Steel Desktop
I like fvwm2, and have tuned my desktop design very carefully. You may find it useful if:
- You use a monster monitor capable of 1600x1200.
- The main thing you want from your X is as many lines of Emacs buffer as can fit on the screen without causing eyestrain.
- You like to have your key tools (xterm, Emacs, web browser) on a handy but unobtrusive toolbar along with biff, a clock, and a load meter.
- You like to overlap windows as little as possible so you're not distracted by panel-shuffling when you change windows.
- You find using virtual desktops tends to leave you disoriented and wondering why everybody thought this was a neat feature.
- You don't need your desktop to make a fashion statement -- you want a spare, clean design that gets the job done.
Eric's Big Blue-Steel Desktop is basically designed to treat your screen as a two-page display, with Emacs on the right and a couple of xterms (or a Web browser) and the toolbar and icon dock on the left. Font sizes are carefully tuned to be as large as can be consistent with this layout.
You can view a full-sized 1600x1200 screen shot or a half-sized 800x600 screen shot. Thanks to compression and a lot of solid-color areas, both are small (less than 80K).
Here is the .fvwm2rc file that sets it up. It has been commented, with relevant X resource settings explained, so you'll find it relatively easy to modify. Here is the .xinitrc I use with it.
If you find you like this design, either as-is or as a basis for your own hacks, .
Eric S. Raymond
