Written in C | Operating system | |
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Developer(s) Dana Jansens, Mikael Magnusson Initial release 18 September 2002; 14 years ago (2002-09-18) Stable release 3.6.1 / 1 July 2015; 20 months ago (2015-07-01) Repository github.com/danakj/openbox | ||
Openbox is a free, stacking window manager for the X Window System, licensed under the GNU General Public License. Originally derived from Blackbox 0.65.0 (a C++ project), Openbox has now been totally re-written in the C programming language and since version 3.0 is no longer based upon any code from Blackbox.
Contents
Openbox is designed to be small, fast, and fully compliant with the Inter-Client Communication Conventions Manual (ICCCM) and Extended Window Manager Hints (EWMH). 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, and is used in Linux distributions such as CrunchBang Linux, ArchBang, Lubuntu, TinyMe and Trisquel Mini.
The primary author of Openbox is Dana Jansens of Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.
Using Openbox
Openbox allows a right-click (or any other key-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 by right-clicking. Extending Openbox with other small programs that add icons, taskbars, launchers, eyecandy and others is common.
Configuration
There are only two configuration files, both located in ~/.config/openbox. They are named menu.xml and rc.xml. These can either be edited manually or with ObConf and obmenu, both graphical configuration tools.
All mouse and key-bindings can be configured. For example, a user can set:
Pipe menus
Openbox has a dynamic menu system called "pipe menus". It accepts the output of a script and use it as the source for a menu. Each time the user points their mouse at the sub-menu, the script is rerun and the menu is regenerated. This allows users and software developers more flexibility than the static menus found in other window managers.