Default window manager switched to CTWM in NetBSD-current

For more than 20 years, NetBSD has shipped X11 with the "classic" default window manager of twm. However, it's been showing its age for a long time now.

In 2015, ctwm was imported, but after that no progress was made. ctwm is a fork of twm with some extra features - the primary advantages are that it's still incredibly lightweight, but highly configurable, and has support for virtual desktops, as well as a NetBSD-compatible license and ongoing development. Thanks to its configuration options, we can provide a default experience that's much more usable to people experienced with other operating systems.

Recently, I've been installing NetBSD with some people in real life and was inspired by their reactions to the default twm to improve the situation, so I played with ctwm, wrote a config, and used it myself for a week. It's now the default in NetBSD-current.

We gain some nice features like an auto-generated application menu (that will fill up as packages are installed to /usr/pkg), and a range of useful keyboard shortcuts including volume controls - the default config should be fully usable without a mouse. It should also work at a range of screen resolutions. We can add HiDPI support after some larger bitmap fonts are imported - another advantage of ctwm is that we can support very slow and very fast hardware with one config.

If you're curious about ctwm, check out the ctwm website. It's also included in previous NetBSD releases, though not as the default window manager and not with this config.