Hi,

I tried to exit TWM to go back to console. But it won't. I have to manually kill the X server.

What am I doing wrong?

Thanks

I don't if this will help but, for what it's worth, I just started my VM of Slackware and switched to TWM, then entered startx. When TWM opened up, it opened three terminal emulators. I typed exit into one and found myself back at the Slackware command line.

Note that, in Slackware, I boot to the command line, not to a display manager.

I suspect that's because of how twm is being launched in your .xsession file, one of the xterm windows are the 'control' xterm that result in twm exiting when that xterm window is closed.

twm is fine, but now has quirks in the likes of firefox when the press/drag menu style results in firefox 3-dot menu behaviour that is awkward, you have to resort to the arrow keys after initiating the firefox 3-dot menu. ctwm is a later evolution, as adopted as the default in netbsd, that is a click to initiate menu that works better with firefox.

Remember that with twm style you first get the grid of where the window will be positioned and you typically use the bottom left or right corner as the initial position of that corner, and then with the resize button you first mouse into the window and then outward in the direction that you wish to resize/position the top left (right) window corner to.

If you don't have a ~/.xsession then the twm launch code is in something like /etc/X11/xinitrc

Not only awkward. It is impossible to do certain task. On the Firefox task bar, TWM does not allow click-drag. Like I cannot open the Ublock Origin extension at all. I also tried Bitwarden and got same problem.

I guess I will give CTWM a try.

I do use it once in a while, one thing I use with it is vdesk:

https://offog.org/code/vdesk/

But, how do you start twm(1) ? startx(1), via somekind of desktop manager ? Can you get to a virtual console when this happens ? How about while in twm.

That gives you a kind of pseudo virtual desktops, it work great with twm. I may have to fire it up, it has been a while

See: cpcnw.co.uk for an interesting twm page.

Another thing I will miss greatly once we in Linux are forced to move to Wayland

https://www.oreilly.com/library/view...03.html#ch3-12

For a quick test under Linux, in a existing X session xterm window ...

X :1 & # start another X display
DISPLAY=:1 xterm &
DISPLAY=:1 twm

In the default twm menu there are options to restart or exit twm

Can you exit using telinit?

Some info:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Twm
https://man.archlinux.org/man/twm.1

Depends upon usage case. I have a Linux vm (kvm/qemu) on a server that's hard wired (nvidia, i5, 8GB) that I vnc into from OpenBSD running on my (slow) wifi connected laptop - pretty much just base OpenBSD + tigervnc, and when running twm that works fine. Setting squashed tabs is nice as you can place the titles alongside each other whilst that also leaves exposed desktop space that you can click for the OpenBSD menu to present.

The attached image doesn't do it justice as its compressed (jpeg quality reduction), however I find that fonts/display is much crisper under OpenBSD. And things just work, for instance as part of that vnc I also forward sound (sndiod) to the laptop and under Linux its less reliable at for instance having video flow over eth, sound over wlan. OpenBSD in contrast - just works.

Cheating of course, as the vm is running Fatdog Linux using jwm window manager, in my case running chrome rather than firefox, so twm isn't involved in the likes of firefox menu clicks or dragging operations, jwm is handling that instead.

Attached Thumbnails

 

The default /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.twm has this:

which makes exiting contingent on the last xterm (the one with the login), not the window manager. If you are running twm with the default, you'll get this. It's been a long time since I ran twm on Linux, but this default is on Minix3 as well and a few months ago I forgot about it and got "stuck" for a minute. Edit your .xinitrc (or system xinitrc) to not have all the other programs started, just 'twm' as the last line. The twm config is very bare so you'll likely want to edit that as well so your wanted programs show up. Remember that there's a system.twmrc.

If you like basic WM's there's also Motif (mwm) and eMotif (emwm).

Note, in the vtwm mailing list I saw an issue with firefox and vtwm. The same issue also happens in twm.

The issue has to do with "AutoRaise". If enabled firefox menus act very odd. To fix, you do this in firefox:

• go to "about:config"
• set "widget.gtk.grab-pointer" to "1"
• Restart Firefox

1 members found this post helpful.

Fvwm looks like it is bloated compared to Twm.

I use Fvwm, and I keep my setup very minimalist.
Twm looks like the ultimate minimalist WM.

If you really want small and useful, icewm seems to be the champ, with ctwm in second place. I did memory use a very long time ago and that was the case. And based upon posts I have seen, it still seems to be the case.

But with fvwm, you get a lot more with the extra 500K

Xorg is all I have on my FreeBSD.
Installed Nautilus, Firefox, Bluefish, Meld, xbindkeys to launch the apps.
Minimalist it is and works fine, I also developed a Whiptail menu to automate many command line tasks, for logging out of X it launches this command:
X does not have a graceful shutdown option.

EDIT:
I also edit the /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc file as below to get rid of the three terminals, have Feh installed for desktop wallpaper.

For chrome, in twm you can either use the (click root window) menu's 'focus' option, or set up a key such as F12 i.e. if the burger bar menu doesn't stay open press F12 and click it again and it will present and stay open if you've modified your .twrmc to include that the F12 keycode f.focus action. See ...

https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...3/#post6480688