Switching to Openbox

Switching to Openbox

After a decade of windowmaker and fluxbox I've switched to openbox. I was motivated by the fact that some recent fluxbox upgrade left my decor-less urxvtcs visible on all desktops which was rather annoying. Somebody on irc suggested openbox, and after a few minutes I started to like it a lot!

What's great about openbox:

  • it's fast
  • it's based on blackbox (but has been completely rewritten) and has a dock
  • it's standards compliant
  • chainable key bindings
  • pipe menus, menu elements that are dynamically generated through small scripts
  • nice tools like ObConf and ObMenu

I like a minimal configuration, my main workspace has just two terminals.

A productive Desktop with two terminalsA productive Desktop with two terminals

The transparent task bar at the bottom is tint2. The 0.7 version has an integrated systray which is nice, however the debian package is slightly outated. If your version doesn't support the systray download the source from the tint2 page. My version oddly had a binary included in the src/ folder. If you need to compile yourself, apt-get build-dep tint2, go to the src/ folder, type make and copy the binary to some place that's in your $PATH.

The openbox wiki seems to have all the documentation that's necessary, like per application window settings.

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