fluxbox vs openbox

[roddierod]

You can try this: http://urukrama.wordpress.com/2011/10/30/manual-tiling-in-openbox/

I used Openbox for years, but switched to i3 a little over a year ago, I like it better than awesome if you every want to try a tiling wm.

 

[bbzz]

Hmm, i3 you say. I've been using scrotwm and dzen for a long time now. Any reason to try i3?

I'll check that manual tiling for openbox for sure. Once you go tiling you can never go back.

 

[roddierod]

I probably can't give you a coherent reason to use i3 other than, I tried them all and it was the only one that made sense to me. I think the biggest selling points from me were more control over how the windows tile, being able to assign certain apps to float(why do you need a giant full screen xcalc?), being able to assign certain workspace to a specific monitor when using dual monitor and the configuration files are simple you don't need to recompile or learn lua to try different configurations.

I used Openbox for something like 5 or 6 years and since switching to i3, I felt no need to go back.

 

[vermaden]

Is there anything in any of them to make possible pseudo-tiling? Maybe an external program that is able to tile windows? That is really the only thing missing. Something like scrotwm-openbox combo would be perfect (and no, I won't try awesome).

There are many of such manual tiling solutions, I even wrote one myself (tile.sh).

The most popular seems to be pytyle3 but I haven't been able to make it work on FreeBSD, I have used pytyle1 in the past, but it wasn't that great, pytyle3 seems to address all these issues, but it does not run

Mine (tile.sh) is a simple POSIX shell script that is spawned from the Openbox shortcuts in ~/.config/openbox/rc.xml file like these

    <keybind key="A-a">
      <action name="Execute">
        <execute>tile.sh tile</execute>
      </action>
    </keybind>

    <keybind key="A-c">
      <action name="Execute">
        <execute>tile.sh swap</execute>
      </action>
    </keybind>

It also does Windows Aero Snap (put window on the left or right side of the screen), just add keyboard shortcuts for tile.sh left or tile.sh right to Openbox.

Here You can download the tile.sh script: http://pastie.org/pastes/4037741/text

 

[bbzz]

Oh very nice, I'll give it a go when I reinstall openbox.

 

[sw2wolf]

@sw2wolf

Both are very lightweight, Openbox is a little more lightweight and faster because its written in C instead of C++ (Fluxbox), but the difference probably will not be noticeable.

Thanks! BTW, how to make applications tabbing automatically in fluxbox?

 

[jrm@]

BTW, how to make applications tabbing automatically in fluxbox?

Put something like the following in ~/.fluxbox/apps:

[group]
[app] (name=blah)
  [Workspace]   {0}
  [Head]        {0}
  [Maximized]   {yes}
[end].

This automatically groups the application. You can also control maximization, location, etc. The fluxbox wiki has lots of recent documentation.

 

[sw2wolf]

[group] 
    [app] (name=xterm) (class=XTerm) 
    [app] (name=firefox) (class=Firefox) 
    [Workspace]   {0}
    [Head]        {0}
    [Maximized]   {yes}
[end]

However, Firefox and xterm still cannot be grouped together.

 

[priyadarshan]

Here You can download the tile.sh script: http://pastie.org/pastes/4037741/text

That pastie.org page is unfortunately gone. Where could I find it now?

 

[blackhole]

Have a look here: https://github.com/vermaden/scripts

 

[priyadarshan]

Have a look here: https://github.com/vermaden/scripts

Perfect, thank you!

 

[Ogis]

You can also try labwc. Labwc is a wlroots-based window-stacking compositor for wayland, inspired by openbox.

Here is labwc, runing in linux, screenshot.