2009/6/12 Frédéric Perrin <frederic.perrin@resel.fr>:
I'm surprised that in this thread, nobody mentionned FVWM yet. It's a bit "the great old one", one upon which quite a number of other WM are based, but it is still actively developped. It is maybe a bit bigger that other WM mentionned, but we are far from KDE / GNOME / XFCE.
A great strength of FVWM is its configurability (don't forget it is coming from someone who uses emacs ;-). The default desktop is rather rough. Instead, you are expected to configure it to your linking. The behaviour of the WM is completely definable. You can have titlebars with ten buttons bind to any mouse button doing any action you wish, dynamic menu that fetch there contents over the Net, panels that swallow arbitrary applications. It supports UTF-8, PNG transparency and blending, binding actions to mouse motion (haven't tried this one yet...), Xft2 fonts, etc.
It can be as silent or as intrusive as you like, just giving you a frame around windows to move them or a full environment that doesn't pity some DE's ones.
There is quite a diversity of shots in fvwm.org's screenshots section (but the artistic taste of some is sometimes lacking :).
-- Fred
I've been using FVWM-Crystal for a little while and I'm not planning on going back to XFCE (which i've been using for a coupe of years). I too like FVWM (and FVWM-Crystal) configurability. Although it's a steep learning curve at first, I managed to get the basics to my liking farely quickly (thanks in part to the concept of recepies) and I will do more tweaking as I go along. For some screenshot you can check out http://www.fvwm-crystal.org/screenshots.html -- Louis Brazeau Informaticien