This looks a little too Windows 95, but the dock is a nice reminder that it’s X Windows.
The last time I revisited one of these old X projects, I wound up wasting time with libraries that have been deprecated for a decade or more.
It's funny how quickly things were moving at the time. In the mid 90's, GUI design elements were still in their infancy. Even basic stuff like "what do windows do?" was in flux. Traditional X window managers hadn't settled on anything like a regular usage model: twm was still in regular use, fvwm mostly cloned its UI, Sun was still defaulting to OpenWindows which was pretty and clever but sort of an evolutionary dead end, and other commercial unixes were running Motif which was a lot like a monochrome Windows 3.1 that used too many pixels. Macs were still stuck in the only-one-foreground-app-is-enough model with System 7 and had nothing to offer.
Then Windows 95 landed like a bomb: there was a CLOSE button in the corner of the window finally! And there was a start menu and a little status bar! And that's what we all decided we wanted, really badly. So it got cloned and picked up pervasively. Basically everyone not already part of one of the X11 camps was running this.
But the window was small. KDE kicked off mere months later, Gnome followed quickly after that, and we all forgot about fvwm95. But we for sure all remember it.
Huh? Perhaps I'm misunderstanding, but Mac windows had close buttons even as far back as System 1.x in 1984. Multitasking didn't land until System 5 with the optional MultiFinder in 1987 (made standard in System 7), but window close buttons were absolutely not a Win95 innovation.
[1] These were the dark days of the mac. It was falling behind rapidly and the failure was accelerating. Jobs would walk back in the door within months of this moment too! Again, Windows 95 isn't felt to be notable in this community of true believers, but it was absolutely a bomb in the market as a whole. It changed everything, instantly.
Sure, on $15k ($30k in 2025 dollars) Mac II's. See also the answer elsewhere about NeXTSTEP being a player in this space.
No one was doing it in the consumer space, no consumer knew about that stuff, Linux consumers on their 14" 800x600 monitors sure hadn't see it. And to repeat yet again, Microsoft Windows 95 landed like a bomb in this community and changed everything. And it happened very fast.
Also, the Amiga had the window management you refer to in its earliest versions, in 1984. Amigas cost a hell of a lot less than $15,000, even packed to the brim with expansions. I grew up with the Amiga, so your assertion that "No one was doing it in the consumer space, no consumer knew about that stuff, Linux consumers on their 14" 800x600 monitors sure hadn't see it." is anecdotally false.
And you will be perpetuating ridiculous flame wars from the 1980's until the day you die, as is the nature of such users. For sure Amiga nuts are the worst.
I guess I should give up. The point here, which everyone insists on ignoring, is that to the general computer using population, even the reasonably expert Linux one, "Window Management" was an oddball soup of mostly failed ideas and experiments until Microsoft Windows 95 showed us all how it should work. And we all absorbed those ideas instantly and continue to use them to this very day. And FVWM95 was very much of a piece with that moment.
I mean, there's a reason why the Linux community in the mid-90's didn't all flock around clones of DRI GEM or AmigaOS. You get that, right?
Windows 95 didn't bring that much to the table over Windows 3.1, in terms of basic window management. The taskbar is really about it.
GEM died when DRI lost their stalwart status, as well as when Apple sued them. Amiga died when Commodore refused to innovate in the hardware space, but the engineers always had top-notch innovative OS ideas.
The finder was always a multi-window interface.
I just don't know where your memory is from.
When Windows 95 was released, the top of the line was the PowerMac 81000 and the remaining Quadras, and 1024x768 was common. Overlapping windows and multitasking were not particularly unheard of… The Mac Plus had not been sold for half a decade. System 7 was released 5 years before, and 7.5 at about the same time. I mean, sure Windows 95 was successful, but let’s not rewrite history.
I have memories of being endlessly frustrated trying to use an iMac because "close" would just hide the window.
We've gone full circle, and now everything in windows likes to treat close as "minimize to system tray", but back in win9x era, the expectation was that close was "terminate the application".
This serves a couple of purposes: first, documents open more quickly (particularly when the program is loaded from a slow spinning HDD, floppy, etc) since the program doesn't need to be reloaded, and second, new document creation flows and non-document functions can be accessed without having a document open or requiring the developer to create a bespoke "home screen" UI that serves that purpose since the full menubar is accessible as long as the app is foregrounded.
See this is what I mean, that's completely alien to a MS Windows user in the mid-nineties.
This is only confusing in comparison to Windows though. If you used graphical DOS applications, it was the exact same experience. You open the app, and can interact with your documents, but closing a document doesn't necessarily close the app.
Even Photoshop on Windows of the day worked the same way. When you opened Photoshop, a parent window would open that was the app. Closing documents left the app open, unless you also closed the parent window.
This was also copied into other X window control styles. Even today, a Motif replicates the Windows 1.0-3.11 top-left menu+close button.
Yeah, yeah, I know CUA allows for a window close. No one knew. I worked IT at the time (as did lots of us here in our youth I'm sure) and was constantly teaching and re-teaching this trick to the poor people trapped with their CUA environments.
But suddenly with Windows 95 you could see how it worked.
[1] Even if we knew in our bones, c.f. this very discussion about the popularity of a cloned hack on Linux, that it was the Right Thing.
It's almost a shame Microsoft clung to DOS compatibility for so long, that probably kept a lot of power users from seeing what Windows could do. But on the other hand, it's probably a good thing because it kept Unix popular and gave Linux and BSD room to grow.
I think the html editors of the time defaulted to some of style we now find quaint/quirky.
This style was a popular choice because it was easy to write, and could be displayed by just about any web browser. Compatibility and low resource usage was important back then.
You can see some (fairly old!) screenshots here: https://fvwm-themes.sourceforge.net/screenshots/
Glad to see it's still around.
Edit: Here's the thread (Gentoo Forums): https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=80517
The thread ran a total of 121 pages over 7 years.
My linux days started around 95/96, and I was always using low-resource environments due to necessity. Other than FVWM95 the other system I recall using for a long long time was IceWM which was something I switched to around 1999/2000.
It's incredible how much charm there was in these interfaces, specifically in the bitmap fonts. Were GUI applications more or less graphically diverse than now ?
Usage:
xmkmf -a
make
export LD_PRELOAD=./libXaw95.so.8.0
xcalcBy then I was already into other window managers.
While you may get the Look, you will never get the Feel.
I don't update OS to relearn basic controls every 2 years, I update OS to get latest versions of apps.
KDE is a powerhouse. I probably replace 10-15 applications just by using what's built-in to that.
P.S. Oh, there is the official Qvwm page: https://sourceforge.net/projects/qvwm/files/qvwm/
I don't recall what was broken, but it was a few random things. I also added xrender image scaling on the window decorations, because they were hardcoded to a size that was tiny on modern DPI.
https://github.com/zy/zy-fvwm/blob/master/fvwmrc/taviso.fvwm...
Someone made a full cde style desktop with fvwm: https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE
It’s too bad tech seems so much to take away this kind of configurability in the name of “we know better”. There’s so much to be said for software that can last so long, as opposed to the constant treadmill of forced updates.
Fuck gnome eternally for destroying gtk and fuck Wayland.
https://slackbuilds.org/repository/15.0/desktop/fvwm95/
I like the Win95 aesthetic, but I like a close relative, KDE1, better; and I have configured my Plasma 6 setup along these lines. Screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/Q9Gfs08
Back into FVWM, Slackware also has a SlackBuild for the next-gen fvwm3. FVWM configurability could be amazing, although it can be a challenge.
A C++ GUI toolkit with the Windows 95 look and feel.
erickhill•3h ago
That page even looks a tad dated for 2001!