fvwmwiki/ ConfigsGeneral/ generalconfigguidelines

General config guidelines

  1. Creating and Editing .fvwm2rc
  2. System-wide Settings

Creating and Editing .fvwm2rc

Fvwm stores its settings in the .fvwm2rc file. These settings can affect all sorts of things, such as what windows look like, menus and what mouse clicks and keyboard shortcut events do.

Each user can have their own .fvwm2rc file, which is in their home directory. This file can either directly under the home directory, or it can be in the ~/.fvwm. Note that as of FVWM 2.5.X, FVWM searches for its config file in the following locations, in order of preference. As soon as it finds one of them in that order, it stops looking:

$HOME/.fvwm/config
[INSTALL_PREFIX]/share/fvwm/config

$HOME/.fvwm/.fvwm2rc
$HOME/.fvwm2rc
[INSTALL_PREFIX]/share/fvwm/.fvwm2rc
[INSTALL_PREFIX]/share/fvwm/system.fvwm2rc
/etc/system.fvwm2rc

If you have installed from source without any prefix option [INSTALL_PREFIX] will be /usr/local. Distrubutions may use other prefixes. You can, of course, find out the absolute path by running:

fvwm-config -d

Please note, the last five locations are not guarranteed to be supported in the future. Although since FVWM 2.4.X still uses ~/.fvwm/.fvwm2rc, this can still be used, above and beyond ~/.fvwm/config provided that file does not exist.

To create and edit a .fvwm2rc file, from your ~/.fvwm directory, input the command: 

touch .fvwm2rc

The .fvwm2rc file is created.

Then you can edit it using whatever ?editor you like (see: filestructure). Although be advised that writing your own config file from scratch can be a little tedious and time consuming. Quite often people like to download existing .fvwm2rc files from other users and then edit it to suit their needs.

System-wide Settings

The settings in .fvwm2rc only apply to an individual user. The default settings for users that do not have their own .fvwm2rc files generally lives under /etc/X11/fvwm though this may differ from operating system to operating system. Of course, a user's .fvwm2rc file overrides this file anyway.

If no config file exists FVWM has its own default menus and behaviour that it will use. This is just to provide very limited capabilities to move windows, and should not be relied upon to provide any real user-friendly mechanism for long periods of use.