Openbox

Openbox is a free, stacking window manager for the X Window System, licensed under the GNU General Public License.^[5] Originally derived from Blackbox^[5] 0.65.0 (a C++ project), Openbox has been completely re-written in the C programming language and since version 3.0 is no longer based upon any code from Blackbox.^[6] 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.^[7]

Openbox Window Manager
Basic Openbox session
Developers	Dana Jansens,[1][2] Mikael Magnusson[3]
Initial release	18 September 2002; 23 years ago (2002-09-18)
Stable release	3.6.1[4]  / 1 July 2015
Repository	github.com/danakj/openbox
Written in	C
Operating system	Unix-like
Type	Stacking window manager
License	GPL 2.0 or later[5]
Website	openbox.org

Openbox is designed to be small, fast, and fully compliant with the Inter-Client Communication Conventions Manual (ICCCM) and Extended Window Manager Hints (EWMH).^[8] It supports many features such as menus by which the user can control applications or which display various dynamic information.^[5]

Openbox is the standard window manager in LXDE, and often set as the default for LXQt. It is used in Linux distributions such as BunsenLabs, GreenBANG, Lubuntu, Trisquel and Manjaro.^{[9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16]}

The creator and primary author of Openbox is Dana Jansens of Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.^[1][17]

Using Openbox

Openbox provides a right-click (or any other key-binding) "root menu" on the desktop,^[5] 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. Or, sometimes, by middle-button-clicking. Extending Openbox with other small programs that add icons, taskbars,^[5] launchers, eyecandy and others is common.

Configuration

ObConf, a GUI configuration editor for Openbox

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 the graphical configuration tools ObConf and obmenu.^[5][18][19]

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".^[5][20] 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.^{[citation needed]} 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.^{[citation needed]}

See also

• Free and open-source software portal

• Fluxbox – another fork of Blackbox
• Comparison of X window managers