# 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)[1], the only window manager around when X11 was first released. twm supplanted uwm as the default window manager supplied with X11 from the X11R4 release in 1989.

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

## Installation

twm is provided by the package xorg-twm.

## 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. Many `~/.twmrc` files have been posted online. The site xwinman.org has several `~/.twmrc` files with screenshots which might provide inspiration. A Google search for "twmrc" can 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 [2].

## See also

- "UWM (computing)", Wikipedia. Retrieved October 22, 2009.
- "twm", Wikipedia. Retrieved October 22, 2009.
- twm(1) man page
- "Sample twmrc", custompc.plus.com. Retrieved August 12, 2013.
- "Window Managers for X: TWM/VTWM", xwinman.org. Retrieved October 22, 2009.
- Kask, Eeri. "TWM -- Revised Edition -- Again", lists.x.org, January 3, 2010.

Category:

- Stacking WMs