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From: kludge@panix.com (Scott Dorsey)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: getting the most out of TWM
Date: 17 Jul 2024 14:50:40 -0000
Organization: Former users of Netcom shell (1989-2000)
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I ran systems at a facility that had a number of Vaxstations using VMS
with the VWS windowing system as well as a few Sun machines running SunView.
These were both windowing systems without access to remote windows on 
other systems, and without X behind them.  Instead they used proprietary
ystems calls for window displays, and people liked the UIs.

We got X11r3 on some of the Sun systems, and I don't remember where we got
the kit from but it wasn't sunfreeware.com and it did some as a binary kit
that sat in /usr/local/X11.  I started up the X server and got a nice grey
screen and couldn't do a damn thing with it.  So I figured out that I needed
a script that started up a window manager and what came with it was twm.
But when I did this, I hardly got any more.

After looking into the man pages for a while, I figured out how to configure
a .twmrc file, and I did it with SunView in mind and set the thing up to 
look as much like SunView as possible with a similar background, similar 
menus and submenus, and similar mouse button operations.  It was pretty good,
and people who were used to SunView liked it.

I thought of X11 at the time not as a windowing environment but as a kit 
that you could use to build a winding environment.  That's not how I had
started out thinking about it, but it's how I ended up.  

I think it's still reasonable to think of twm this way.  You can make it 
however you want it, but it doesn't come with much.  Man, it is so much
faster than struggling with gnome, though.
--scott

-- 
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."