Openbox
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Openbox | |
 Screenshot of Openbox with context menu rendering the window border for Nautilus, the GNOME file manager. |
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| Latest release: | 3.3.1 / September 7, 2006 |
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| OS: | Unix-like |
| Use: | Window Manager |
| License: | GPL |
| Website: | www.icculus.org/openbox/ |
Openbox is a free window manager for the X Window System, licensed under the GNU General Public License. Openbox was originally derived from Blackbox 0.65.0, but has been totally rewritten in the C programming language and, since version 3.0, is not based upon any code from Blackbox.
Openbox is designed to be small, fast, and fully ICCCM- and EWMH-compliant. Though the aim of smallness may sacrifice some features present in other window managers, such as menu icons and round window borders, it does support many other features such as menus by which the user can control applications or which display various dynamic information.
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[edit] Using Openbox
Openbox allows a right-click (or any other bind) "root menu" on the desktop, and allows users to configure the way windows are managed. When a window is minimized it becomes invisible. Some ways of bringing it up again is to use Alt+Tab or the Desktop menu, accessible from the right-click (or, again, any other bind the user wants) menu. Extending Openbox with other small programs that add icons, taskbars, launchers, eyecandy and others is common.
[edit] Configuration
There are only two configuration files located in ~/.config/openbox. They are named menu.xml and rc.xml. If users do not want to edit them by hand, they can do most of the configuration with an easy-to-use tool called obconf. All mouse and keyboard bindings can be configured. For example, if a user wants a window to go to desktop 3 when the close button is clicked with the middle mouse button, the user can do this trivially. Scrolling on the icon to move to the next/previous desktop and raising or not raising when clicking/moving a window is fully configurable.
[edit] Unique features
Openbox's menu system has a method for using dynamic menus. This is done by accepting the output of a script and using that output as the source for a menu. Each time the user points his or her mouse at the sub-menu, the script is re-run and the menu is regenerated. This capability allows users and software developers more flexibility than the standard static menus found in most other window managers.
For instance, two developers wrote a script in Python that lists a user's new Gmail messages in a sub-menu [1].
