PCmanFM & Co
I thank you again,
@taz , for your nice howto.
It eventually pushed me in a certain direction, so now I've ended up using
TWM as it's MOST minimalistic. With Graham's configuration it even looks pretty elegant, I'm only missing the option to switch windows focus using Alt+Tab...
A couple of things I added to the minimalistic setup you've described:
1. PCmanFM is excellent, but in order for things to look nice i've installed icon themes etc. Without them you only have file names in the file manager window, not cool. Then icon stuff requires some of these ports like
misc/shared-mime-info,
graphics/gtk-update-icon-cache etc. I know, you mentioned you didn't want GTK...
2. Adding
devel/gvfs and
devel/gamin enables PCmanFM to see CIFS network shares, which is something I really need in all installations. So to make it work it only proved necessary to install these two (
gvfs,
gamin) in addition to
x11-fm/pcmanfm itself, then make sure to start
pcmanfm using command
dbus-launch pcmanfm &
. Yes, some of the dependencies somewhere installed
dbus anyway...
3. Of course, I had to keep watchful to not accidentally enable
HAL somewhere in dependencies (at least because my Xorg was compiled without it, so why pull it in again?).
4. Unfortunately, I can't test the effectiveness of this minimal install of mine (RAM and CPU usage), since I've just upgraded my computer to something rather powerful... But in any case, I recently grew tired of these full DE's like GNOME, regardless of how powerful the system may be. And manual installation/configuration of a custom minimal (well, comparably so) X-based system with all the necessary things proves to be VERY instructive in the way of learning how things work.
5. It's a pity
Epiphany web browser, although being "extremely lightweight", pulls is the whole gnome desktop as dependency. What are they thinking about?? And
Midori proved to be somewhat unstable: for some inexplicable reasons it may start up the window or... it may not and just keep running as a process. The only solution proved to be to start it in private mode, in which it is not much use as it doesn't open links and tabs... So I finally "compromised" by installing
Firefox, which in turn insisted on compiling
pulseaudio, which gives no sound anyway
.
But in the way of having multiple dependencies, I've noticed most desktop applications like web-browsers and file managers all need some basic set of dependencies like
docbook*,
vala etc., 20-40 in number.