This is part of The Pile, a partial archive of some open source mailing lists and newsgroups.
Icewm is a cool, minimal window manager, that imitates one of the few things that Microsoft got right in the original windows UI: it's not quite so mousey. In icewm You can Alt-tab between windows (though more often than not, I use Alt-esc, or Cntrl-Alt-Esc), and you can use alt-space to open up a menu pad that let's you control any window (e.g, "Alt-space n" minimizes). I find that Alt-F4 is also useful to just blow away a window. This is how I run icewm. I've got to start-up files in my home directory (/home/doom): /home/doom/.Xclients: # run profile to set $PATH and other env vars correctly . $HOME/.bash_profile # setup background ### xsetroot -solid '#2E0017' # setup mouse acceleration xset m 7 2 # run initial programs emacs . & # start icewm, and run xterm if it crashes (just to be safe) exec icewm || exec xterm -fg red /home/doom/.icewm/preferences: DesktopBackgroundColor="rgb:00/07/00" DesktopBackgroundCenter = 1 DesktopBackgroundImage="/home/doom/bg.xpm" TaskBarAutoHide = 1 Note that I'm setting the background color inside of the .icewm/preferences file for some reason (I don't remember why), instead of inside of ~/.Xclients. Also, I've got an image centered in my desktop in this file: /home/doom/bg.xpm If you've got a jpg or gif you want to use for this, you can convert them to xpm format using the gimp. Don't forget to do a: chmod u+x ~/.Xclients To make that file executable. ===