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Openbox

 
Wikipedia: Openbox
Openbox Window Manager
Openbox desktop.png
Screenshot of Openbox with Mozilla Firefox, Exaile and Obconf open and Thunar rolled up.
Developer(s) Dana Jansens[1]
Stable release 3.4.8 / December 8, 2009
Written in C
Operating system Unix-like
Type 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.[2]

Openbox is designed to be small, fast, and fully compliant with the Inter-Client Communication Conventions Manual (ICCCM) and Extended Window Manager Hints (EWMH).[3] It supports many features such as menus by which the user can control applications or which display various dynamic information. Openbox is the standard window manager in LXDE,[4] CrunchBang Linux[5] and TinyMe.

The primary author of Openbox is Dana Jansens of Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.[1]

Contents

Using Openbox

Openbox allows a right-click (or any other binding) "root menu" on the desktop, and allows users to configure the way windows are managed. When a window is minimized it becomes invisible. To bring windows up again most use Alt+Tab or the Desktop menu, accessible from the right-click (or, again, any other binding the user wants) menu. Extending Openbox with other small programs that add icons, taskbars, launchers, eyecandy and others is common.

Configuration

Obconf, a GUI configuration editor for Openbox.

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 ObConf, an easy-to-use tool.[6]

All mouse and keyboard bindings can be configured. For example, a user can set a window to go to desktop 3 when the close button is clicked with the middle mouse button or when scrolling on an icon to move to the next/previous desktop and raise or not raise when clicking/moving a window, is also fully configurable.

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.

See also

References

  1. ^ a b Jansens, Dana (November 2007). "User:DanaJansens". http://icculus.org/openbox/index.php/User:DanaJansens. Retrieved 2008-04-07. 
  2. ^ GentooWiki (March 2008). "HOWTO Openbox". http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Openbox. Retrieved 2008-04-07. 
  3. ^ "EWMH Compliance Document". http://git.icculus.org/?p=dana/openbox.git;a=blob;f=COMPLIANCE. Retrieved 2009-09-09. 
  4. ^ LXDEWiki (September 2008). "LXDE Wiki". http://wiki.lxde.org. Retrieved 2008-09-28. 
  5. ^ CrunchBang Linux (December 2008). "CrunchBang Linux". http://crunchbanglinux.org. Retrieved 2008-12-29. 
  6. ^ Openbox project (June 2007). "ObConf:About". http://icculus.org/openbox/index.php/ObConf:About. Retrieved 2008-04-07. 

External links


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Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Openbox" Read more