mlvwm

Takashi Hasegawa wrote mlvwm in 1997 in the tradition the name points to: like FVWM, a virtual desktop of several pages, one configuration file, ~/.mlvwmrc, that controls everything, and a firm idea of what things should look like. The idea was classic Mac OS. Windows get a title bar with horizontal stripes, a close box at the far left and a zoom box at the far right, and across the top of the screen sits a menu bar that is always there, with an apple on the left and menus the user defines in the configuration. Desktop icons, double-clicks and that kind of detail were included; it was a look you recognised from across the room.

What could not be imitated was the whole point of the Mac menu bar: that the active program's menus move into it. X programs have no way to export their menus, so the bar only showed what was in the configuration file. The result was a desktop that looked like a Mac from a distance and behaved like X up close, which was exactly what a certain kind of user wanted in 1998. Development stopped around the turn of the millennium; in the 2010s a maintained fork appeared on GitHub, with modern build tooling and the same stripes.