 One of my favorite standalone window managers is actually not a tiling window manager but a floating window manager. I have always been a huge fan of the open box window manager. It's always had a special place in my heart. It's one of the very first window managers I tried when I switched to Linux on the desktop back in 2008 and I keep coming back to it every now and then. When I still log into an open box session and play around with it because it's just a really neat little window manager. It's very fast, very lightweight, has a ton of customization options. One of the problems with the open box window manager for new users though is open box is one of those very minimal window managers out of the box. It's one of those window managers that gives you nothing but a black screen. No wallpaper is drawn. You have no panels. There is a menu, a right click menu so if you right click the mouse though will be a menu that appears on the screen but out of the box I think it's just populated with a few hard coded items like you can launch an X term if you have X term installed on the system and things like that. So the purpose of this video other than I haven't tried out open box in a while and I want to play with open box a little bit is I'm going to share with you guys five tips for the open box window manager for you guys that are trying it out. So let me switch over to my desktop here and this is open box. I of course have configured my open box desktop right so I do have a wallpaper. I do have a panel at the bottom of the screen. This is the tent to panel. I've also customized my right click menu to include many of my favorite programs and this is an XML file that generates that or populates this right click menu and I just manually edit that file to populate it with all my programs. There are tools that will automatically create this right click menu and populate it with all the programs that you have installed on the system and that really is my first tip. So one of the tools that you should probably install if you're gonna play around with open box is this neat little program called menu maker. Menu maker is a Python program. It's just a little Python application that you run in the terminal and it automatically generates a menu for your right click menu and open box. It also generates menu systems for other standalone window managers like Blackbox, Fluxbox, JWM, actually use menu maker and almost all of these at one time or another although to be honest because I've been a such a long time user of open box I've always just maintained the menu system myself but that's probably not something most people wanna do because actually creating an XML file and populating everything in this menu system yourself. It is a little tedious. I'm not going to lie. Let me open a terminal here. Let me clear the screen. And what you would have to do if you wanted to maintain this menu system yourself without the help of a program like menu maker is in your favorite text editor you need to open this config file. So I'm gonna do dot config slash open box slash menu dot XML. So dot config slash open box slash menu dot XML is where the XML file that generates that right click menu and populates it with all your programs. That's where that should live on the system. And you can see this is a rather lengthy file, right? And especially when you have a couple of hundred different programs installed on the system and you're trying to add it all to that particular file. So menu maker will generate something like this automatically. All you need to do to use menu maker is open a terminal and zoom in. So you guys can see the command run the command M maker. And then name of the window manager you're generating the menu for in this case, open box. Because remember menu maker works on a variety of different window managers. In my case, a lot of times I found that just running M maker open box does not work sometimes it requires this flag here dash T ask you to specify a terminal and fault terminal on the system. And usually just give it dash T space X term if you have a problem just running M maker open box. The next tip I want to give you guys is the panel. So if you're going to run a standalone window manager like open box that doesn't come with its own panel, you're going to need a third party panel. The one I use is called tent two. And it's I use it because it's just one I've always used. It's been around forever and it seemed like this was the panel everybody used with open box back when I started with desktop Linux. So I've just kept using this panel. It's really nice. It's very minimal. It's not a lot of stuff to it. I mean, you can add quick launchers like I've got for my favorite programs here. I have this first quick launcher, which actually just launches Rofi. And then this one here launches PC man FM. And I've got quick launchers for the terminal, my browser for Emacs. Other than that, when you have a program opened, like most panels with taskbars, you can minimize an item, unminimize an item. It does have time and date. It does have a sys tray. If I had LX session running, it should have a sys tray right here next to the time, at least in my config, you can move things around in this config. There's some customization options available with the tent two panel. Now, if you wanted something a little more fully fleshed out, you know, more than just a bare minimal panel like tent two, you could install something like LX panel. LX panel is the old panel that was used with the LXDE desktop environment. That thing runs just fine with open box. And you'll actually have a proper menu system that's populated, not the open box menu system, but the menu system that comes with the LXDE desktop environment. So you could try LX panel. The other thing you could do is just install your favorite doc, things like a plank and docky and Cairo doc. I've used all of those at one time or another with open box. All of them work just fine. The third tip for open box users, especially new open box users is even though it's not a tiling window manager, that doesn't mean that you can't actually key bind everything you do. And I strongly suggest getting use to opening and closing all of your programs with key bindings where possible. For example, I often open a terminal. I'm always in the terminal, right? So super enter has always been my key binding to open a terminal in all my tiling window managers. It's also my key binding and open box super enter will actually open the alacrity terminal actually opens the fish ill within the alacrity terminal. And in all of my window manager configs, super shift C will close the window with focus. So super enter, super shift C, if I wanted to get a run prompt and most of my window managers, I have super shift enter will get me like a D menu prompt or a Rofi prompt here in open box. I think I had it binded to super R for run prompt or in this case Rofi. So and then I could just run whatever such as alacrity here super shift C to close. Now let me open up something like a PC man FM. I'm going to click the quick launcher here. And this is PC man FM. I can maximize it. I can unmaximize it. The other thing is with key bindings. I think on mine, I had something like a, I think I had super alt and the arrow keys would, you know, snap it. So that was to the left, to the left. And now this is to the right, to the right. Now dip baby dip. Come on, come on. Okay. You guys are probably not old enough to remember that song. But you know, I've got some key bindings here. I could do super up, not super alt up, but just super up, super lift, super down. I've got a variety of key bindings that will actually manipulate exactly where these windows appear and what quadrant on the screen. And again, super shift C to close. And that was actually my fourth tip other than key bind everything in open box. You can also pseudo tile. It's not really tiling. It's quasi tiling, right? It's almost tiling. So, you know, open box can really be that gateway drug to when you're ready to graduate to a full-fledged tiling window manager. And the final tip is actually several tips in one, but I'm gonna give you several programs that you probably want to have installed on the system just to make your life a little easier. So I'm gonna open up a terminal here. I'm gonna zoom in. So you wanna install a few different programs. Some of them are open box specific programs. Some of them are more generalized programs that you can use with any standalone window manager, not just open box, but let's start with the open box specific ones. You make sure you have this program here installed, OB conf or OB config. So that's an easy way to quickly change your OB, oh, open box theme. So that's what OB conf is. Make sure you have OB menu installed. That is a graphical way to add and remove things from your open box menu. So after you've generated your right-click menu either by creating it yourself by writing that very lengthy XML file or maybe you had menu maker generate a menu system for you. Eventually you're gonna wanna edit it. You add things to it and move things around. And OB menu is a nice graphical way of doing that. Let me open up OB conf and OB menu. So if I go in here and let me find OB conf here, this is the open box configuration manager is actually what it is. You can see it is just a tool for changing the theme. You can set window rules, appearance. You can change the font settings and the window decorations. I like the window decorations on the left side of my windows. It just makes more sense. Everything being on the left side. But if you wanted to, you could have them on the right side. You can rearrange the orders of what closes a window, maximizes a window, shades the window and all of that. Here is the shade. That's just rolls the window up basically. So that is OB conf. OB menu, let me get back into the menu system. This is OB menu. And if you expand it out here, let me make the window bigger here. I'm not used to using floating windows and having to resize things with the mouse. But you can see accessories games and graphics, you know, accessories games and graphics and it's just your menu system. Go in here, find whatever it is that you need to edit. Maybe I need to edit my terminal because it looks like the last time I set this, it was set to X terminal emulator. Basically the default X terminal on the system. Maybe I want to change that and just go ahead and hard code that to a Lackardy and launching the fish shell in a Lackardy. Then I click save and then close that. And now if I go into accessories and open terminal, it should be the fish shell within a Lackardy. And that's exactly what opened and close that. The next program I strongly suggest you guys install is a program called LX appearance. And this is the old appearance settings for the LXDE desktop environment, but you can use it with any desktop environment or window manager. This is a tool that allows you to change your GTK theme. It's mainly what you're gonna use this for. So let me open up this. All right, and this is the LX appearance tool. Again, we set our GTK theme. Right now the GTK theme I'm using is DT dark theme because I actually have my own GTK theme I created years back just for open box. It's a very dark theme. That's why I named it DT dark theme. I have it up on my GitLab. It's not in my dot files repository. It's actually in its own repository. The repository is called DT dark theme. I'll link to it in the show description. If you happen to want my open box configs and my tent to config, those will be in my dot files repository. You'll find them in my dot files repository under dot config slash open box and dot config slash tent two. Open box is still one of the slickest, cleanest window managers, not a lot to it. And I love one thing I didn't mention. This is a more of an advanced feature, but there are things like dynamic menus in open box. They call them pipe menus. It's where you can create a script, a bash script or a Python script or whatever and have something automatically, dynamically populate this menu. So everything doesn't have to be hard coded. So my music player is actually a script I wrote. I think I wrote it in Python, I think it's been a while, but this is a script for dead beef where if I hit play here, should launch dead beef and start playing something. I'm going to pause it. And if I go back to the menu system and go back to music player track info, you will see. It's actually me playing the trombone, but that's the track. It gives you the name and everything. It gives you the runtime. If I had it playing, you know, tell me if it was playing or paused or what have you. So, you know, you can do really neat stuff like that with your bash scripting and Python scripting. You just have that stuff output here in the right-click menu, such as my virtual box pipe menu here. These are all the virtual box VMs I have installed at the moment. I just created a simple script that searches that virtual box directory on my system that lists all the virtual machines and I just have it output here. It's just a really convenient way for me to launch one of these VMs without having to launch virtual box and then launch the VM. I just launch it directly from the open box right-click menu. So that was just a few tips for the open box window manager. I'm really glad I got to play with open box for a little bit in the last couple of days. I've actually been playing with it more and more here in the last couple of weeks. I've logged into it a few times, played with my old configs and it's just really nice. It's very nostalgic when you go back to something that especially when it's something that you discovered early on in your desktop Linux career. You guys know that. All of us have a soft spot for our very first Linux distro, our very first desktop environment or window manager, right? And open box is kind of like that for me. Probably within six months of me switching to Linux on the desktop, I switched to open box and that's how long I've been using open box for almost all of my desktop Linux experience. So that's why it has this special place in my heart and just makes me smile every time I log into the thing. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of the show, Epsy, Dallas, Gabe, Lou, Mitchell, Allen, Akami, Arch 5530, Chuck, David, the other David, Dylan, Gregory, Louis, Paul, Scott, Wes, and Willie. They are the producers of this episode without these guys. This episode about the open box window manager would not have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen as well. All these names you're seeing on the screen, these are all my supporters over on Patreon because this channel is supported by you guys, the community. If you'd like to support my work, look for DT over on Patreon. All right guys, peace. Open box is so much better than GNOME.