Re: Four questions, mainly about window managers.

[Frederick I Gleef <gleef capital net>]

To take a stab at answering your questions:

> First, what advantages are there if a window manager has gnome-support?

A window manager having GNOME support means three things:
  1) It supports X Session Management
  2) It supports MWM window hints
  3) It supports special GNOME window hints, which is still a work
     in progress

Most window managers have had 2 since before GNOME was conceived.  I don't
know how much of an issue 1 is, FVWM2 seems to have no problem with it.
Item 3 is currently supported only by the development releases of ICEwm,
but Enligtenment 0.14 may also include support for it.

The advantage of supporting Item 1 is that you can use gnome-session for
session management.  The advantange of Item 2 is that you have better
support for X-Windows software in general.  Currently, the only advantage
of Item 3 is that you can use the wmpager_applet.

In the future, more GNOME programs will use these window hints, and window
manager support will be more important, but currently, it's not very.

> Second, I am used to the fvwm window manager and don't want all the
> "cool" thingies such as I have seen in screenshots of enlightment. I
> would like the windows to be clean boxes, not "screens" as in E. 

No problem, I am using GNOME with FVWM2 (Version 2.0.46) quite happlily,
the only 'issues' I have are that the wmpager_applet doesn't work (not a
surprise), and the panel blocks the edge sensitivity features.  Both of
these I consider relatively minor.


> Also it should have virtual paging, so when I scroll the mouse left,
> another desk pops up (preferably a small version in the gnome-panel
> showing where things are, I couldn't help noticing the wmpager_applet, 
> but it does nothing in fvwm).

You seem to be getting FVWM desktops confused with FVWM viewports.  Most
window managers allow for multiple desktops, each desktop usually (but not
always) being the screen size.  FVWM allows for multiple desktops, but it
also encourages making the desktop size far larger than the screen size,
and the FvwmPager allows for moving a viewport around a large desktop as
well as between desktops.

The EdgeScroll feature of FVWM belongs in a window manager, not GNOME,
GNOME merely should not interfere with it.  FVWM only supports items 1 and
2 above, so one wouldn't expect the wmpager_applet to work.  Even when
FVWM does get GNOME support, the wmpager_applet thinks in terms of
desktops, not viewports, so it might not be as useful as a hardcore
FVWM user might like.


> Also in fvwm, if the panel is at the bottom, the paging doesn't work and
> it won't scroll down (or whereever the panel is).

True, this is a bug.  Whether it is a bug in FVWM or gnome-panel has (to
my knowledge) yet to be explored.  My suspicion is that it is a bug in
FVWM, since the EdgeScroll feature gets flaky when other windows (eg.
Netscape) are right up against the edge of the screen.

One of these days I or some other FVWM user is going to get fed up, and
figure out why this problem exists.  Until then it falls under the
heading of nuisance bugs.


> The wm should also preferably have a popup menu coming out of the
> desktop as in fvwm.

This is a window manager feature, this sort of thing should not be
specified by GNOME.


> And I hate any kind of win95-looking boxes.

Don't run FVWM-95, or icewm's Win95 theme then. :-)


> So is there any windowmanager that has these features, and, at the same
> time is gnome compliant?

No, but icewm comes closest, and is worth a look.  Find it at:
   http://ixtas.fri.uni-lj.si/~markom/icewm/

Make sure to get the development version, not the stable version.  Use the
metal or gtk theme to avoid a Windows 95ey look (or the OS/2 theme is
cool).  You will be missing two things, only one of which you listed.
  1) Icewm does not have an EdgeScroll feature.
  2) Icewm is nowhere near as customizable as FVWM.

As far as I can tell, the icewm developer has no intention of supporting
either of those features.


You also might want to take a look at SCWM, at:
   http://web.mit.edu/mstachow/www/scwm.html

SCWM is similar to FVWM, except:
  1) Nice Guile configuration files, rather than wading through m4's if
     you need any programming capability
  2) A developer who is on the GNOME list, and paying attention to GNOME
     development (Hi Maciej!)
  3) It is still under active development (both a plus and a minus)
  4) No Pager yet :-(



> Third, how can I add/edit the entries in the main menu in the panel? I
> have tried to find a file with these, but with no success.

I am not sure, but I think you can add entries by putting a desktop
entry in %prefix/share/apps/<filename>.desktop.  For example, on my
system, where GNOME is installed under /usr, I have a
/usr/share/apps/gnome-help.desktop file that would make a good starting
point to look at.


> Fourth, [snip]

I think others have answered this better than I can.


Best of Luck,
-Gleef