Openbox

Openbox is a highly configurable, next generation window manager with extensive standards support.  Openbox is a variation on the *box window manager where right-click (or any other custom binding) with the mouse will bring up the (user-configurable) root-menu

What makes Openbox unique from the other *box's is its ability to have dynamic generated menus (pipemenu's). A shell script,C-program... can be placed into the configuration of Openbox's menu generation and as long as its output is valid Openbox xml for its menu's. This allows a menu that is not static like other window managers (xml feeds, new email list...)

Placeholder
Configuration for Openbox is split into 3 files
 * autostart
 * only used if starting the openbox-session wrapper script, not just openbox. Intended for use when started from a login manager.
 * menu.xml
 * rc.xml

Autostart
Openbox on its own will load a default menu, default resource config and a preconfigured list of startup applications The defaults are listed in

The default autostart.sh will
 * set a default background colour
 * start a user dbus session
 * pre-configure GTK themes
 * if gnome detected load gnome-session-daemon
 * else if xfce is detected load xfce-mcs-manager
 * load any KDE startup apps
 * run XDG autostartup

Such autostart can be user-overridden with a file of their own from which anything the user wants for a better desktop experience can be launched.

each process within the autostart.sh need to be backgrounded by appending & to fork the process, except those which are equipped with an option to fork, i.e. urxvt -f, conky -d (except Thunar --daemon, which does not really fork until quitting time, see Thunar(1))

Menu config
the application menu of openbox (default keybind is right mouse on desktop) is defined in an xml document called menu.xml Just like with the autostart.sh there is a default menu that will be used if no user menu.xml is provided


 * Default:
 * User:

There are multiple ways to configure the user menu.xml
 * edit the xml by hand and follow the openbox menu guidelines
 * a graphical application to aid in creating a user menu.xml
 * and utilize the command line obm-xdg application that will generate an applications menu based upon Gnome menus layout

obm-xdg can be used to dynamically generate the openbox applications menu thus removing the need to re-edit your menu.xml every time an app is installed/removed Add this to your menu.xml to



RC config
See http://openbox.org/wiki/Help:Applications

Pipe Menus
See the Openbox Pipemenus page for more information.

Create custom keyboard shortcuts
To create custom keyboard shortcuts, edit your accordingly (If you are a LXDE user, the file is named ) :

Example :

See the Openbox Binding page for more information.

Setting up shortcuts with obkey
There is a tool available that can make this process more convenient, called obkey.

Icons in openbox menu
Since version 3.5.0 you can have icons next to your menu entries. For this:

1) You must emerge openbox with imlib support. Add USE flag "imlib" for x11-wm/openbox into you /etc/portage/package.use like this: "x11-wm/openbox imlib" and run "#emerge x11-wm/openbox"

2) Add yes in the section of the rc.xml file

3) Add in menu.xml icon=" " like this: 			 xterm

Tint2
Tint is a nice task bar and launcher Tint2

Openbox