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# twm

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- Window manager

twm is a window manager for Xorg. It is a small program, being built against Xlib rather than using a widget library, and as such, it is very light on system resources. Though simple, it is highly configurable; fonts, colours, border widths, title bar buttons, etc. can all be set by the user.

twm was written by Tom LaStrange, a developer who was frustrated by the limitations of uwm (Ultrix Window Manager), the only window manager around when X11 was first released. [1]

twm supplanted uwm as the default window manager supplied with X11 from the X11R4 release in 1989. [2]

twm has stood for Tom's Window Manager, Tab Window Manager and more recently Timeless Window Manager.

## Installation

twm is installed through the xorg-twm package.

## Starting

Run `twm` with xinit.

Note: On startup there is only a black screen. Try to move your mouse and left click to get a twm menu to make sure that twm actually works.

You can also start twm with a display manager. The `twm.desktop` file does not exist so we have to create it at `/usr/share/xsessions/`. In the newly created `/usr/share/xsessions/twm.desktop` file, copy and paste:

    /usr/share/xsessions/twm.desktop

    [Desktop Entry]
    Name=twm
    Comment=xorg-twm
    TryExec=twm
    Exec=twm
    Type=Application

## Configuration

By default, twm looks very dated and unintuitive. By creating the file `~/.twmrc`, you can customize twm to make it more friendly.

twm(1) gives full details of the commands which can be used in your `~/.twmrc` file.

### .twmrc examples

Many `~/.twmrc` files have been posted online. Some examples include:

- Sample .twmrc file (Physics Department Unix Login Mini-Howto, W&M University through Wayback Machine)
- sample twmrc files (Apple Open Source/X11/X11-0.46.4)
- system.twmrc (Apple Open Source/X11/X11-0.46.4)
- twm configs - 1 (custompc.plus.com)
- twm configs - 2 (custompc.plus.com)
- Window Managers for X: TWM/VTWM[dead link 2024-03-03 ⓘ] (xwinman.org)

A Google search for "twmrc" can also be used to find new ideas.

## Tips and tricks

### Patched version

There is a patched version, not in the repositories, with updated features such as transparency. A description and build script is available on the xorg mailing list. It can be tried out by installing xcompmgr, running the build script, putting the resulting `twm` and `dot.twmrc` files in a convenient directory, and editing the `~/.xinitrc` file so that the last two lines are

    xcompmgr -o 0.3  -c -r 8 -t -10 -l -12 &
    /path-to-directory/twm -visual TrueColor -depth 32 -f /path-to-directory/dot.twmrc

## Troubleshooting

### Oversized window titles and menus

You might find that titlebars and menu entries in TWM are extremely large - twice the size that one might typically expect. This is a locale issue with TWM that occurs when a `UTF-8` locale is used. Setting the locale to `C` fixes the issue. See [3].

## See also

- Graham's TWM Page!
- Graham's TWM Page 2
- TWM -- Revised Edition -- Again
- twm(1) man page
- twm official Gitlab
- twm on Wikipedia
- X Window System User's Guide - Ch. 3 Using the twm Window Manager
- X Window System User's Guide - Ch. 10 Customizing the twm Window Manager

Category:

- Stacking window managers

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