In 1993, during his work analyzing acoustic signatures for the United States Department of Defense, Robert Nation began hacking twm with the intent of simultaneously reducing memory usage and adding support for virtual desktops.

[3] Already known for his rxvt terminal emulator, Nation worked on reducing the memory consumption of his new window manager.

In late 1998 the office of FVWM maintainer was abolished and a group of volunteers conducted further development.

Many window managers in use today have been influenced by FVWM, notably Afterstep, Xfce, Enlightenment, and Metisse.

However, when Chuck Hine was answering questions for the official FVWM Frequently Asked Questions, Chuck had never agreed with the 'feeble' explanation and added alternate possible meanings of F (as in the name of the window manager) to the FAQ, with many entries coming from mailing list messages.