“In the beginning there were twm, and fvwm, and fvwm2. In
terms of a window manager, those were your basic choices.
Frustrated with their lack of flexibility and visual appeal,
Carsten Haitzler (a.k.a. “Rasterman”) started down the path that
would lead to the creation of the Enlightenment window
manager.“
“Initially, Haitzler began learning C and Xlib programming by
hacking on the fvwm2 sources, in an attempt to add customizations
that were not currently available to him. However, he still wasn’t
satisfied with his results, and so Enlightenment was born. By his
own account, he learned through trial and error. The guiding
principle behind his work was simply to create the most flexible,
attractive, and easily customizable window manager in
existence.”
“As time passed, Haitzler was surprised at the number of people
who, like himself, wanted a window manager that took customization
and visual appeal to new heights. Encouraged by the demand for
Enlightenment, his coding efforts continued, leading to the birth
of Imlib (Haitzler’s replacement for libXpm, which he found too
limiting). Imlib would now serve as the Enlightenment “backend,”
performing image-handling tasks.”