![]() ![]() Speaking of sub-menus, one little but really neat feature of Openbox is that it makes it really easy to create dynamic ones. ![]() This will give you immediate access to Konsole, Gnome Terminal, Emacs terminal or the old, but immortal Xterm. Menus are almost the same as Gnome's, with one notable addition: Openbox knows its users aren't afraid of the command line, so it has a whole Terminals sub menu. System menus are accessible with the right mouse button. By default it's a dull, dark grey background and nothing else.ĭon't despair, though, everything is here and the wiki on the Openbox website lists plenty of options to add panels. A basic design idea of the *box window managers is that it's not just panels that are unnecessary you don't really need icons either. If you aren't prepared, the first time you start Openbox you'll find yourself nervously wondering whether your graphics card passed out. Keep in mind, however, that most of what you read in this page also applies to Openbox's relatives. Today, Openbox is the window manager of that family that you are most likely to find pre-packaged for your distribution. Over time, that application has spawned several variants, recognisable by the 'box' suffix. Those installable as binary packages in Fedora frankly failed to impress: a system monitor such as Gkrellm does the same things better and looks much cooler too.Į16 is wildly configurable, fast and fun but maybe a little erratic.īack in the 90s, if you wanted a lean and mean but flexible window manager, that was able to do what you wanted with minimal eye candy and few distractions, but that didn't look like some GUI experiment from a decade earlier, sooner or later you'd try Blackbox. It is possible to write small, graphical add-ons for E16, such as clocks or mailbox and system monitors, called epplets. At least in Fedora, E16 alone starts, and runs single programs, faster.Ībove all, E16 + KDE looks like two screenshots pasted over each other, fighting over who should be on top. Nearly everything can be done with the keyboard.Į16 can be launched alone or inside KDE or Gnome, replacing their default window manager. Different move and resize effects exist and visual tooltips pop up so learning E16 by doing is easy. You can even use more iconboxes simultaneously.Įach window is configurable individually and you can tell it to remember its settings. In the right bottom corner of the screen lives an iconbox, a sort of panel with a slider that holds all your icons without cluttering the screen. The top bar of each workspace has two tiny triangles at its edges that open the system menu and windows lists. This takes a while to get used to, but many users like it (eventually). Pushing the mouse cursor on the edge of your screen moves you to the other half of the current virtual desktop. Each is twice as wide as your monitor, but it could be as much as 64 times bigger. By default, you have two virtual desktops. In the same place you can also clear the many caches that E16 uses to work faster.Į16's default theme has very tiny window borders but you can change its look in lots of ways. If you do that or install epplets (more on them later), remember to select Maintenance > Regenerate Menus from the System menu. Firefox, for example, is present both as Firefox and Firefox Web Browser.įinally, as weird as it may seem, you cannot change E16 menus without editing the text files in $HOME/.e16/menus/. On top of that, probably due at least in part to packaging bugs in Fedora 14, a lot of entries are repeated with the same or different names. So a novice should first know if he or she wants to go Gnome or KDE and only then tell the computer if it's time to work, surf the internet or play. Instead of first level sub-menus such as Games, Internet, Office and so on, you get KDE, Gnome, and Others, each with its own Games, Office, etc. ![]() The main, if not only, problem we've found in E16 is that its default application menu is a mess. E16 also has shelves, or boxes that work more or less like Gnome panels. The configuration panels have so many options, it takes half a day to look at them all. Doing so is what makes it so fun and quick to use, so be prepared to spend some time on it. You can customise every single detail of how E16 looks, feels and behaves. The second is great for typing very long lines in terminals or editors without wrapping them around or losing sight of other windows. The first feature (present in many other window managers) lets you read as many lines of text as possible without scrolling. ![]() E16 is the only window manager in this roundup that is able to maximize windows vertically or horizontally, when you click with your left or middle mouse buttons on the middle icon in the window's title bar. ![]()
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