FVWM: F means Forefather?

FVWM started a long time ago in a Department of Defence office, when Robert Nation started hacking the twm window manager. Of course, twm also has a history but that’s another story. Nation’s main goal was to reduce memory usage while adding support for virtual desktops.

In June 1993 he bundled it with rxvt, a project he’d been working on, which was already successful (and still is). As development continued and maintainers changed, the meaning of the F in the title, which had originally meant ‘Feeble’, became lost. When the original announcement was retrieved from newsgroups, the developers decided to leave the F’s meaning mysterious. FVWM has since been used to create new window managers (some that we’ve mentioned in this tutorial).

Xfce is one notable one which has become the default manager in many distros, especially ones aiming to be lean on memory while still offering styling and convenience. The NeXTSTEP OS, inspired by AfterStep, is also a derivative of FVWM. Several others were designed to resemble other operating systems. For instance, you can probably guess what Fvwm95 was designed to look like while AmiWM had a stab at looking like Amiga OS and MLWM made a good job of looking like Apple’s famous OS. Another derivative called FVWM-XPM lead to the popular Enlightenment window manager.