5 ms·

I use fvwm. The ability to work easily with windows bigger than the screen is vital on a netbook.

by elwin 13y ago

dfox 13y ago
That is actually the reason why I started using Fvwm 10 years or so back.
gizmo686 13y ago
Can you elaborate on how fvwm handles windows bigger than the screen?
- elwin 13y ago
  fvwm uses a virtual desktop. "The screen is a viewport onto a desktop which may be larger than the screen." You can move the screen around over this virtual desktop. Moving down has the same effect as moving all the windows one screen height up. If a window is larger than the screen, you can easily pan around to see other parts of it. This is very handy when your screen height is 600 pixels and $ENTERPRISE_APP draws dialog boxes 1200 pixels tall. It also means I can lay out windows with a total area several times the screen area without having any overlapping. I wish someone would make a compositing window manager based on a big virtual desktop instead of on shrinking all the windows to illegibility and making me pick one to obscure all the others.
  - gizmo686 13y ago
    I seem to remember my computer (Running Ubuntu 10.04 with NVidia drivers, and the standard DE) doing that at one point. Through changing my external monitor, the resolution used was larger than my monitors, and I could scroll the viewport by mousing over the edge. I never bothered to figure out exactly how enable/configure this feature intentionally, because I saw it as more annoying and simply reset the resolution. I also remember being on a mac, wherer I could zoom in the entire screen, then scroll the viewport.
    - elwin 13y ago
      That's X11 panning, which has a similar effect. The X server has one big screen buffer, and the physical screens get mapped into regions of it. You can enable it by using xrandr with the --panning option, and it will work with any DE. fvwm doesn't change the X11 screen size, it just moves all the windows to give the appearance of moving the screen in the other direction.

I use fvwm. The ability to work easily with windows bigger than the screen is vital on a netbook.

by elwin 13y ago

I use fvwm. The ability to work easily with windows bigger than the screen is vital on a netbook.

dfox 13y ago

That is actually the reason why I started using Fvwm 10 years or so back.

gizmo686 13y ago

Can you elaborate on how fvwm handles windows bigger than the screen?

elwin 13y ago
fvwm uses a virtual desktop. "The screen is a viewport onto a desktop which may be larger than the screen." You can move the screen around over this virtual desktop. Moving down has the same effect as moving all the windows one screen height up. If a window is larger than the screen, you can easily pan around to see other parts of it. This is very handy when your screen height is 600 pixels and $ENTERPRISE_APP draws dialog boxes 1200 pixels tall. It also means I can lay out windows with a total area several times the screen area without having any overlapping. I wish someone would make a compositing window manager based on a big virtual desktop instead of on shrinking all the windows to illegibility and making me pick one to obscure all the others.
- gizmo686 13y ago
  I seem to remember my computer (Running Ubuntu 10.04 with NVidia drivers, and the standard DE) doing that at one point. Through changing my external monitor, the resolution used was larger than my monitors, and I could scroll the viewport by mousing over the edge. I never bothered to figure out exactly how enable/configure this feature intentionally, because I saw it as more annoying and simply reset the resolution. I also remember being on a mac, wherer I could zoom in the entire screen, then scroll the viewport.
  - elwin 13y ago
    That's X11 panning, which has a similar effect. The X server has one big screen buffer, and the physical screens get mapped into regions of it. You can enable it by using xrandr with the --panning option, and it will work with any DE. fvwm doesn't change the X11 screen size, it just moves all the windows to give the appearance of moving the screen in the other direction.