Openbox is a free, stacking window manager for the X Window System, licensed under the GNU General Public License. Since at least 2010, it has been considered feature complete, bug free and a completed project. Occasional maintenance is done to keep it working, but only if needed.
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.
The creator and primary author of Openbox is Dana Jansens of Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.
Using Openbox
Openbox provides a right-click (or any other key-binding) "root menu" on the desktop,
All mouse and key-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
- when scrolling on an icon to move to the next/previous desktop
- raise or not raise when clicking/moving a window
Pipe menus
Openbox has a dynamic menu system that uses "pipe menus". A menu item in a piped menu system can accept the standard output of a shell script (or other executable) in order to generate a sub-menu. Because the script runs every time the pointer activates it, and as the script can assess environmental conditions, piped menus enable conditional branching to be built into the menu system. When the window manager is restarted, a static menu system as used on most window managers gets its layout once and will not have the ability to modify the menu layout depending on environmental factors.
See also
- Fluxbox – another fork of Blackbox
- Comparison of X window managers