Hitchhiker's Guide to Openbsd

11.5 - Customizing X
11.5.1 - Introduction
OpenBSD's default X environment is fully functional, but you may wish to customize it. You may wish 
to change the background pattern or color, or you may wish to change the Window Manager (the 
program that most defines your X environment), or change the applications that are started when X 
starts. 
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11 - The X Window System
The default window manager in OpenBSD is 
fvwm(1)
. Fvwm is a good, general purpose window 
manager, but it is hardly your only choice; it isn't even the only window manager included with 
OpenBSD (see 
cwm(1)
 and 
twm(1)
). A large number of window managers are also available through 
packages
. 
Similar to the the 
system startup script
, X has a process it goes through to set up the user environment. 
More accurately, it has more than one process; which process is used depends on how you 
start X
. 
Understanding how X starts will help you understand how to customize your work environment the way 
you wish it to be. 
Note that you can customize the environment on both a system-wide and user level. It is probably best to 
do user level changes rather than to change the system defaults, as the user scripts are stored in the user's 
home directory, so you will have less merging of files to do when upgrading to the your version of 
OpenBSD. The system-wide defaults are in 
/etc/X11
and were initially loaded from 
xetcXX.tgz
, 
which is not reloaded by the 
suggested upgrade process
, so if you make system-wide changes, they will 
persist, but you may need to merge those changes into later versions of those files. 
11.5.2 - startx(1) startup
startx(1) looks for the file 
.xinitrc
in the user's home directory. 
.xinitrc
is usually a shell script, 
which can start as many X "client" (applications that use X) programs as desired. When this script exits, 
the X server shuts down. Generally, most of the programs run by this script should run in the 
background, though the last one should run in the foreground (typically the window manager); when it 
exits, the script will exit, and X will be shutdown. 
In the simplest case, this can be as little as just the name of the window manager you wish to invoke: 
cwm
Or you can get a little more fancy: 
xconsole -geometry -0+0 -fn 5x7 &
oclock -geometry 75x75-0-0 &
xsetroot -solid grey &
cwm
That will start the 
xconsole(1)
which provides a copy of any text that the kernel would have sent to the 
console (which is now covered by the graphical screen), an analog clock, 
oclock(1)
, and sets the 
background to a solid grey background with 
xsetroot(1)
all before invoking the 
cwm(1)
 window 
manager. Note that only the window manager is not "backgrounded" with an "&" character. This means 
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11 - The X Window System
that X will stay running until cwm(1) exits. 
If a user's home directory does not have a 
.xinitrc
file in it, the system's 
/etc/X11/xinit/
xinitrc
file is used. This file can provide you some additional ideas for your .xinitrc script.