Eric's Big Blue-Steel Desktop

I used to use fvwm2, and tuned my desktop design very carefully to get maximum use out of the screen space. (Now I use GNOME + Sawfish, which is just as effective but harder to bundle up a configuration for). You may find it useful if:

You use a monster monitor capable of 1600x1200 or better.
The main thing you want from your X is as many lines of Emacs buffer as can fit on the screen without causing eyestrain.
You like to have your key tools (xterm, Emacs, web browser) on a handy but unobtrusive toolbar along with biff, a clock, and a load meter.
You like to overlap windows as little as possible so you're not distracted by panel-shuffling when you change windows.
You find using virtual desktops tends to leave you disoriented and wondering why everybody thought this was a neat feature.
You don't need your desktop to make a fashion statement -- you want a spare, clean design that gets the job done.

Eric's Big Blue-Steel Desktop is basically designed to treat your screen as a two-page display, with Emacs on the right and a couple of xterms (or a Web browser) and the toolbar and icon dock on the left. Font sizes are carefully chosen to be as large as can be consistent with this layout.

You can view a full-sized 1600x1200 screen shot or a half-sized 800x600 screen shot. Thanks to compression and a lot of solid-color areas, both are small (less than 80K). Note: these are PNG images; if they're broken, get a browser that can view PNGs

Here is the .fvwm2rc file that sets it up. It has been commented, with relevant X resource settings explained, so you'll find it relatively easy to modify. Here is the .xinitrc I used with it.

# Set up the X desktop
#
# The screen background
xearth -pos "orbit 3 70" -bigstars 20 -gamma 2.6 -label -nomarkers -night 15 &
#
# The window manager.
fvwm2

If you find you like this design, either as-is or as a basis for your own hacks, drop me a line.

(I still use a very similar layout under GNOME).