Hi all,

IceWM is a very nice, good looking and extremely lightweight window
manager with a Win9x look and feel (which I consider the best look and
feel we every had in the computer world). As far as I know, it's not
maintained, but 20 years ago it did everything it was supposed to do,
so like Fetchmail and runit, it's perfect as-is and is unlikely to
garner ugly scope creep.

Back in the early and mid 00s I used Mandrake/Mandriva with IceWM. Lots
of nice themes were available for it, including a forest green theme.
It had a nice taskbar that told you what you needed to know. Did I
mention it was VERY lightweight and responsive?

But the startmenu...

On Mandrake/Mandriva at least, when you first installed the OS, every
application you install is on the startmenu. However, anything you
install afterward is *not* on the startmenu. You could edit the start
menu source data, which is sort of like an overcomplexificated json,
but if you get it wrong, and it's very easy to get wrong, you break the
entire menu. Once upon a time there was a tool to easily configure the
menu, but the IceWM author made changes to the menu which were
incompatible with the tool, so if you need to add an application,
you're back down to counting braces.

The workaround is to run programs with Suckless Tools' dmenu program,
as described in some of these URLs:

https://www.troubleshooters.com/linux/dmenu/bestpractices.htm

https://troubleshooters.com/linux/devuan_docs/devuan_dmenu.html

https://troubleshooters.com/linux/ctwm/dmenu.htm

Basically, if you want a very lightweight user interface with a taskbar
(panel in Linuxese), and you're willing to use dmenu as a program
runner, and you're willing to ignore all those call you a greybeard who
is scared of new things because you're running a 20th century interface,
IceWM is great.

SteveT

Steve Litt
http://444domains.com