Dakkar's `fvwm-crystal` settings

- - -

I use a 2800x1050 desktop (two 20" LCD panels on a GeForce 6600), with -a slightly modified version of the TopLine recipe. I also use a 5x5 -pages virtual desktop, and a Dvorak keyboard with valume keys (mapped -to the proper keycodes in X11). My music player is AmaroK, and my -desktop manager is ROX.

Since my monitors can "pivot", I have further modified the recipe to -handle rotating the displays. This needs help from the video card. See -the section Rotating the displays.

The recipe

The main differences from the stock TopLine are:

different desktop bindings
larger thumbnails
different behaviour of the edges
2 identical pagers (one per physical screen)
geometries rewritten to use @g to work with Xinerama
each pager (and my "biff" terminal) is raised above all other -windows if I keep the mouse pointer on it long enough
some functions added to handle rotating the displays

The decoration

I have changed the Clearlooks DeepSky decoration to add a mini-icon -as button 3.

The colorsets

Since I use tha Gentoo version of fvwm2, it has a patch that -allow fake transparency in the menus. Thus, I changed the -DarkDesktop and WhiteDesktop colorsets to use this feature.

The bindings

I redefined most keyboard bindings to my taste. Of particular interest -may be the Music file, where I bind the volume controls to the volume -keycodes, and the Music-GUI function to the "eject" keycode. I -also bound most window manipulation functions to various combination -of Alt and the numeric keypad (see the Window-Control-Dakkar -file)

The preferences

To be able to select AmaroK as a music player, and amixer as a -mixer control, I created the dakkar_Preferences file, which adds -them to the appropriate menus.

The styles and icons

I added some style declaration and icons for some applications -(e.g. the windows created by xine-ui and xpad should be bare, -and I added icons for xchat-2 and skype)

The functions

I redefined a couple of function in the Numpad to add the -AnyScreen option.

Then I wrote the Mixer-amixer and Music-amarok files to interact -with by chosen music programs.

amixer is a simple command-line mixer, and its integration was -easy.

AmaroK is a KDE application, and it's not straightforward to -control. At the moment only "random", "repeat", "stop", "play/pause" -and "show/hide" are implemented, all via dcop calls.

The Music-GUI function is used to toggle the display of -AmaroK, and also to start it: it the dcop calls fails, the -amarok command gets executed, launching the program.

Note

AmaroK and Trayer

For some not-really-clear-to-me reason, the tray icon of AmaroK -is not displayed by Trayer, normally. To work around this -problem, I have written the small amarok script, which sits in -my ~/bin directory (which is at the beginning of my -$PATH). Using this, the icon works as expected.

I also tweaked a Perl script I found on the Web to create a menu for -my screen sessions, see the Screen-Menu configuration file and -the fvwm-screen.pl script.

Finally, in the Notify file, I redefined the UrgencyFunc to pop -up a notification via the dbus notification mechanism (using a simple -Perl script which uses Net::DBus).

Rotating the displays

This takes a little background.

First of all, my /etc/X11/xorg.conf file has a Screen section -like this:

-Section "Screen"
-  Identifier  "dual-nv"
-  Device      "nvidia"
-  Monitor     "LCD"
-  DefaultDepth 24
-  Option "TwinView" "true"
-  Option "MetaModes" "DFP-0: 1400x1050 @1400x1050 +0+0, DFP-1: 1400x1050 @1400x1050 +1400+0"
-  Option "RandRRotation" "on"
-  Option "Xinerama" "on"
-
-  SubSection "Display"
-    ViewPort 0 0
-    Depth    24
-    Modes    "1400x1050"
-  EndSubSection
-EndSection
-

This specifies that, normally, I use my displays horizontally, one to -the right of the other.

Then, in my ~/.xinirc, I add a second "MetaMode":

-./bin/nv-control-dpy --add-metamode \
- 'DFP-0: 1400x1050 @1400x1050 +0+1050, DFP-1: 1400x1050 @1400x1050 +0+0'
-

The nv-control-dpy program can be found in the source tarball for -the nvidia-settings program, in the samples subdirectory.

You may be wondering: why adding a second MetaMode in this way, when -you can specify both in the xorg.conf file? Good question. The -answer is that, if you do it "the logical way", the always helpful -NVidia drivers will tell the X server that you have a virtual screen -whose size is the bounding box of the union of all MetaModes. Which in -my case would mean that I'd have a lot of panning around, very -irritating when you use multiple viewports. Adding the MetaMode after -the startup of the X server avoids this issue.

In the recipe, I have two functions to set landscape (normal) and -portrait (vertical) orientation. They call xrandr to set the -display orientation and size, and do some repositioning of the various -things that need it:

a script instructs ROX-Filer to change its "pinboard" to the one -with the proper layout (this is not optimal, but since I very rarely -change the contents of my pinboard, works well enough for me)
gkrellm2 and my "biff" terminal get moved to their proper -positions during StartFunction

Maybe there's a samrter way to get the same result, but this works, -and it only took an evening to set up.

Dakkar's fvwm-crystal settings