SliTaz Handbook (en)

JWM

JWM - Joe's Window Manager

Joe's window manager, written in C is quick, simple, clean, stable and efficient. JWM proposes a taskbar, a menu of icons and a pager for the management of virtual desktops. The taskbar can also act as a dock. In addition it is easily configurable with a single text file that can change the menu, fonts and their sizes, and different colors. To install jwm on SliTaz:

 # tazpkg get-install jwm

Logout your current X session, type F1 at Slim login and choose jwm to start JWM. To make JWM your default Window Manager, just type: tazx jwm.

Use and configure JWM

The application of Joe's Window Manager is very fast. To view the menu just click somewhere on the desktop. You can resize a window through the edges or corners, minimize or pass a virtual desktop to another via a pager. You also have configurable keyboard shortcuts for faster access to the applications that you often use. On SliTaz the system configuration file is /etc/jwm/system.jwmrc. Apart from this file, each user can use its own configuration file hidden in ~/.jwmrc. This is a text file using XML syntax, it can edited with a simple text editor - lines beginning with: <!-- are comments that let you understand what each tag does.

To facilitate the customization of the desktop, SliTaz automatically copies at the launch of the first (graphical) session, a system configuration file to the root directory of the user. You can directly modify this file and test without risk. To edit with your favorite text editor:

 $ geany $HOME/.jwmrc &

To retrieve an original configuration file, you can copy the system configuration file and rename it .jwmrc in your home directory:

 $ cp /etc/jwm/system.jwmrc $HOME/.jwmrc

The tag RootMenu corresponds to the menu displayed by clicking on one of the (three) buttons on the mouse. To add a category, you must use the tag: Menu - this contains entries for various programs. Any entry in the JWM menu can fit on one line. Example using the GQview image management application:

<Program icon="gqview.png" label="GQview">gqview</Program>

There are still many opportunities to configure RootMenu according to the mouse buttons; the choice of method to move windows, create groups, etc. The Manual is available online at the official website of the project. To view a list of command-line options, just type jwm -h in a terminal.

Create your own JWM style

Creating your own graphical style with JWM is relatively quick and easy, the tags are clear and the attributes possible are given in the comments. When preparing your work, you can see your amendments by restarting the window manager from the menu or via the jwm -restart command. In the configuration file, style tags start after the  comment. To begin, here is a short list of the main style tags with a short description:

Background manages the wallpaper. This tag supports the solid, gradient, image or tile attributes, to respectively:- use a solid color, create a gradient, display a resized image or tile an image.
BorderStyle controls the windows border.
TrayStyle controls a taskbar. The taskbar may, among other things be automatically hidden or only fill a part of the screen with the width attribute.
TrayListStyle controls the style of the list of open windows on the current desktop.
PagerStyle controls the pager displaying different virtual desktops (4 by default).
MenuStyle defines the menu style.
The icons are defined by the IconPath tag, you can use your own personal icons by specifing the full path to the directory that contains them. Note that you can specify more than one path, if you want, you can use your own icons and those contained in the /usr/share/pixmaps and /usr/share/icons system directories. SliTaz uses the Tango theme icons: tango.freedesktop.org for the menu, these are 16x16 and are stored in /usr/share/icons/Tango. You can add, edit, delete these... If you want to install new icons in your user space, we advise you to use ~/Picture/Icons (set as default) or a hidden directory ~/.Icons.

The colors can be defined by their name or RGB number, such as #3A4956. To use colors in their gradient mode, you must specify the two colors separated by a colon, example #6C0023:#3E1220. You can change fonts and their sizes by using the Font tag. There are still some small things that you can change to customize your desktop, such as the name of a menu item and its icon. Before restarting JWM with your new configuration file, you can check its syntax by using the command: jwm -p. To explore further, the official handbook describes all the tags, options and valid attributes. You can view it online at the JWM website.

JWM website

www.joewing.net/programs/jwm/ - The official website of Joe's Window Manager, providing news and a comprehensive manual.
#jwm on irc.freenode.net - The JWM IRC discussion channel on Freenode server.