Good Bye Gnome, Hello KDE, I hope

[Jeremy C. Reed]

On Thu, 12 Jun 2003, Voltage Spike wrote:

> I have been using fluxbox for quite some time now.  Blackbox[1]
> appears to have been abandoned, but the fluxbox people decided to pick
> up the slack.  Some of the greatest new additions are an extensible
> keygrabber, the mouse wheel can change the workspace[2], and it has
> support for KDE/GNOME dock-able applications.

Blackbox is still developed. The development 0.7x code includes netwm (aka
ewmh) support. It is expected to be released officially this summer.

Are you referring to the epistrophy (epist) or epist-ng keygrabber? (They
should work with blackbox 0.70 too.)

I don't think the wheel mouse support is in 0.70 -- I don't use it.
Patches are available for blackbox (old and new). (Patches can be found
via the blackbox webpage.)

I think some support for KDE and GNOME docking (which are same using same
specification now) is in blackbox. YOu can use tools like wmswallow to put
some KDE docs into the blackbox slit. I don't think KDE tray icons will be
supported, because that's not part of the specification (as far as I
know).

> However, I find that the greatest feature, by far, is its ability to
> "tab" windows.  It is similar in concept to tabbed web browsing, but
> placing such functionality in the window manager makes an enormous
> difference.

The does sound interesting. I have only used fluxbox for a few minutes. I
may look again.

> I was going to write more, but I decided that it would be a good
> candidate for my first review on the PLUG website.  Visit

I look forward to reading it. (I have written a few window manager reviews
and also maintain the blackbox FAQ.)

> [1] I had a previous affair with Blackbox due to its low footprint and
> impressively efficient use of screen real-estate, but KDE's Alt-F2
> feature was much too powerful for me to abandon.

Alt-F2 to open a "run as" box?

This can be done with bbkeys or different keygrabber to pop-up that tool
(maybe bbrun).

There are also some other blackbox-derivatives, like OpenBox, to look at.

By the way, I run blackbox with the Icons menu always open.

   Jeremy C. Reed
   http://bsd.reedmedia.net/