Submitted by Fluxbox 1.1.0 has been released. “Fluxbox is a windowmanager for X that was based on the Blackbox 0.61.1 code. It is very light on resources and easy to handle but yet full of features to make an easy, and extremely fast, desktop experience. It is built using C++ and licensed under the MIT-License.” There’s no official release announcement yet, but the code is on Sourceforge, as well as the release notes.
Any hope for Fluxbox supporting basic compositing stuff (at least wall-like and expose-like plugins)?
I know it goes a bit against the minimalism of the WM, but I loved Fluxbox a lot, and having it working with some *simple and useful* compositing would be killer stuff for me.
You could always use xcompmgr. You only get shadows, translucency and fade-ins, but that’s more than enough for me personally.
’nuff said.
Not sure what the “Wall” is (Vista feature?) but exposé, although very pretty, isn’t usable. You cannot rely on muscle memory to find a window; you have to visually identify the window. Windows change size and position and are rarely in the same place all the time, every time. Same with the dock since it changes size.
A lot of people think that “eye candy” is only to look good. Although it does look good I disagree that it has no functional value. Drop shadows help to differentiate windows and help people mentally break the limited space on your monitor apart into individual tasks or applications. The same goes for fading in and out as that can help you spot windows as they open and close, often something that can lead to confusion when things just “disappear”.
Although it’s kind of awkward at first “virtual desktops” are a key feature of any OS for me. The “Cube” visualization/metaphor helps here but for new users or people who simply don’t multi-task it isn’t really useful which I think is something has kept Apple and Microsoft from implementing it—until Apple did in Leopard anyway. This is a big deal to me with all the *nix window managers that I love. When you’ve got two monitors filled with windows for graphics applications, sound editors/mastering applications or anything else it’s nice to be able to separate tasks or like-applications into different desktops. Keeps things clean and easy to work with.
What’s with all the unprintable characters in your post?
Tried to use an em dash. Encoding is such that it doesn’t translate well. Should’ve used the XML entity — instead.
There is also the 3d cube effect:
http://desk3d.sourceforge.net/screenshots.php
It is a bit slow on my laptop
If you experience problems with tarball (windowmenu issue, fix is here – http://phpfi.com/350005 ), use git. It’s ok.
git-clone git://git.fluxbox.org/fluxbox.git
Also, syntax has changed, so better delete or adjust your custom config files.
Edited 2008-09-03 12:03 UTC
Oh Fluxbox how I’ve missed you. This was one of the windows managers I would run on an old laptop (200mhz 96mb ram) and it would give me all the functionality I needed. Since upgrading to a beefier laptop I haven’t used it. Please forgive me Fluxbox.
I am in fluxbox-announce list and in the top of 1.1.0 announce shows:
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New devel release!
Download it here:
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/fluxbox/fluxbox-1.1.0.tar.gz
(md5sum: ad6656594f013cf818b989a5708b71c9 )
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/fluxbox/fluxbox-1.1.0.tar.bz2
(md5sum: b9fc486c1abeea0ad91c77439c20b092 )
News in 1.1.0:
[…]
————–
The 1.1.0 tarball doesn’t work for me, I get installation failure because of missing windowmenu. It’s fixed in git, so they probably will release a new tarball sometime soon.
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commit a72eeeb2ceb6d5183abb24ed36c202079fe0fa42
Author: Mark Tiefenbruck <[email protected]>
Date: Wed Sep 3 09:36:44 2008 -0400
add windowmenu to dist package
————–
Anyone know a window manager where you can show & hide your dockapps using a key binding?
Window Maker (clip) was able to do that, and it was an in-built feature in Ion. And it’s, of course, also possible in FVWM, provided you know how to do a bit of scripting. But Window Maker and Ion seem to be things of the past. I haven’t yet found any way to do something similar in either fluxbox or openbox.
Is it possible to bind the showing & hiding of dockapps to a key binding in fluxbox? I know how to do it in FVWM, but I’d also like to do the same thing in fluxbox or openbox.
started using fluxbox years ago and never looked back.
awesome WM, regarless of processor speed.
congrats on the new release :beer:
Agreed!
Just installed FreeBSD 7.0 on a prehistoric laptop here (only 60 Mb RAM) and Fluxbox runs beautifully!
Nice to see old neat things get new life!