ctwm is an extension to twm, originally written by Claude Lecommandeur that support multiple virtual screens, and a lot of other goodies.
You can use and manage up to 32 virtual screens called workspaces. You swap from one workspace to another by clicking on a button in an optionnal panel of buttons (the workspace manager) or by invoking a function.
You can customize each workspace by choosing different colors, names and pixmaps for the buttons and background root windows.
Major features include:
The sources files were once the twm ones only workmgr.[ch] added (written from scratch by Claude Lecommandeur) and minor modifications to some twm files. Since then much more extensive changes and reorganization have been done, so the codebase is now significantly different from plain twm.
If you find bugs in ctwm, or just want to tell us how much you like it, please send a report to the mailing list.
There is a manual page, which always needs more work (any volunteers?). Many useful information bits are only in the CHANGES.md file, so please read it.
ctwm is build using CMake, which does its best to root around in your system to find the pieces the build needs. Occasionally though you might have to give it some help, or change the defaults of what features are expected.
In the common case, the included Makefile will do the necessary
invocations, and you won’t need to worry about it; just run a normal
make ; make install invocation. If you need to make alterations
though, you may have to invoke cmake manually and set various params on
the command line (cmake also has various GUI configurators, not covered
here).
The following parameters control configuration/installation locations:
$PREFIX below.system.ctwmrc to fall back to if it
doesn’t find a per-user config. Nothing is installed here by
default.
(default: $PREFIX/etc)$PREFIX/bin)$PREFIX/share/ctwm)man1 and man2
live.
(default: $PREFIX/share/man or $PREFIX/man, whichever is
found first)$PREFIX/share/doc/ctwm)$PREFIX/share/examples/ctwm)The following parameters control the features/external libs that are
available. The defaults can be changed by passing parameters like
-DUSE_XYZ=OFF to the cmake command line.
m4 or gm4, you may
need to also set M4_CMD to point at it.
(ON by default)USE_SOUND is a still
valid but deprecated alias for this, and will give a warning.
(OFF by default)Additional vars you might need to set:
m4 or gm4, or full path to it
if it’s not in your $PATH.In the simple case, the defaults should work. Most modern or semi-modern systems should fall into this.
funny prompt> make
If you need to add special config, you’ll have to pass extra bits to cmake via an invocation like
funny prompt> make CMAKE_EXTRAS="-DUSE_XPM=OFF -DM4_CMD=superm4"
Though in more complicated cases it may be simpler to just invoke cmake directly:
funny prompt> ( cd build ; cmake -DUSE_XPM=OFF -DM4_CMD=superm4 .. )
funny prompt> make
ctwm requires various X11 libraries to be present. That list will generally include libX11, libXext, libXmu, libXt, libSM, and libICE. Depending on your configuration, you may require extra libs as discussed above (libXpm, libjpeg, and libXrandr are included in the default config). If you’re on a system that separates header files etc. from the shared lib itself (many Linux dists do), you’ll probably need -devel or similarly named packages installed for each of them as well.
funny prompt> make install
The CMake build system includes sufficient info for CPack to be used to build RPM (and presumably, though not tested, DEB) packages. As a quick example of usage:
funny prompt> make
funny prompt> (cd build && cpack -G RPM)
There is a mailing list for discussions: ctwm@ctwm.org. Subscribe by sending a mail with the subject “subscribe ctwm” to minimalist@ctwm.org.
ctwm development uses breezy (see https://www.breezy-vcs.org/) for
version control. The code is available on launchpad as lp:ctwm. See
https://launchpad.net/ctwm for more details.
Additional information can be found from the project webpage, at https://www.ctwm.org/.