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By macondo at 2004-10-25 20:02
IceWM Tips

Every time i tell people that i use IceWM, they snicker, and i resent that.

If you are an IceWM user, you know it's a great window manager: fast, light, uses very little memory. It's easy to use and one of the quickest to do work with.

Icewm? Are you kidding? You have to click 3-4 times just to launch an app, no icons on the taskbar, it's boring, it looks like Windows 98, etc, etc.

About 6 months ago, i was reading a review of XFCE4, the author, a renown geek, was explaining how fast XFCE4 was, how beautiful, but that it lacked the easiness to program the key bindings that were so crucial on his line of work. He explained that when he was "in the zone", working furiously, with no interruptions, he couldn't bother with the mouse. He thought that XFCE4 was the way of the future, and that he would keep his eye on it, but that in the meantime, he would go back to IceWM.

Now, why would this geek, with the latest on hardware wasn't using KDE/GNOME?

Hmm, maybe i should look at Ice once more, i thought.

I have used most window managers out there (fluxbox, blackbox, openbox, windowmaker, ion3, pwm, AfterStep, Fvwm, XFCE4, and of course, KDE and GNOME, etc), it's my hobby, I'm always looking for an edge for my old box (PII 266), so i installed IceWM again:

# apt-get install icewm icewm-themes iceme

THEMES
It gives you a ton of themes, if you like the
Gnome look there are several:

For the Gnome look: IceGnome2 and many others

For the XFCE4 look: IceBlueCurve and IceBlueOkayish

For the Mac look: aquablue, liquid, sortofaqua

For kde: pkde kde2 ,pkde2, yak

I counted 70 different themes that come with IceWM with icewm-themes package, without counting the others from other sites. There are more themes you can shake a stick at, i'm vision-impaired, so i favor dark themes, my favorite is: 708090

To switch between themes, click on the start/linux button on the far left of the taskbar to get the main menu, choose Themes from the main menu, go down the alphabetical list, click on the theme you like, it will switch like lightning, click on the desktop to make the main menu disappear and voil
‹ HowTo: Use Google Cloud Print on LinuxupInstall KDE 3.4 in Fedora Core 3 without Applications Crashing ›

by Brain Drop on Wed, 2005-01-26 08:58
Thanks for the info, so much better than the typical 'try the wm's for yourself and see what you like'. I think I will give it a try.

by mgouin on Fri, 2005-02-25 00:26
Thank you very much for the great tutorial on IceWM. I'm already using IceWM and you gave me valuable info that will improve my use of Ice.

It might be off topic, but you really caught my attention when you said :
Quote:
I'm always looking for an edge for my old box (PII 266)
Could you give me more of your system info : distro, tweaks you did, amount of RAM, etc... because my PII 350 is really slow for Linux.

Thanks,
Matthieu

by ArchiMark on Mon, 2005-05-09 11:35
Just read your iceWM Tips article, macondo.

Really helpful!!

Thanks for taking the time to write it.

Mark
X/Qt/Debian on Zaurus SL-C3000

by sacgeek on Mon, 2005-05-09 15:34
I've installed icewm, it's there, confirmed as such, however Suse93 refuses to allow it to be shown on the windowmanager as one of the choices. All the others are there. So, how to get it to show up there is the question.
I've installed and uninstalled a couple of times (using synaptic) which normally would add it to the start menu choices.

by craigevil on Wed, 2005-06-15 01:08
How do I edit the keybindings? I really want one key shortcuts that will make things on my laptop so much simpler.

by craigevil on Wed, 2005-06-15 03:41
Sweet figured it out. there wasn't a key file in my icemw home directory it was hiding in usr/share/x11

I now have 1 key opening of the apps I use most. THANK YOU.

by craigevil on Thu, 2005-06-30 23:21
Thought I would share my key short cuts:
key "Alt+Ctrl+t" kcalc
key "Alt+Ctrl+f" xkill
key "Alt+Ctrl+e" acroread
key "Alt+Ctrl+g" gimp
key "Alt+Ctrl+n" xlock
key "Alt+Ctrl+b" blobwars
key "Alt+Ctrl+m" xosview

key "F1" xterm -ls
key "F2" xfm
key "F3" firefox
key "F4" kmail
key "F5" Ctrl+Shift+r
key "F6" grun
key "F7" kplayer
key "F8" openoffice.org-1.9writer
key "F9" gaim
key "F10" kedit
key "F12" konqueror

key "Alt+Ctrl+KP_Divide" aumix -v -5 # lower volume
key "Alt+Ctrl+KP_Multiply" aumix -v +5 # raise volume

by craigevil on Tue, 2005-08-09 12:58
Just came across this IceWM Control Center it is great. No more opening a text editor to edit the IceWM files. Makes editing and changing this a snap. I was very impressed. The site has a RPM and .deb version.

by tuxdev on Tue, 2005-08-09 15:50
cool! I had already figured out IceWM before the article, but reading what I had found out felt so good.


  



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