 Hi, I'm Denshi. This is my open box rice. I guess you could call it by configuration to open box. And today's video is actually gonna be about exactly that, window managers. So window manager basics, featuring open box. Let's get right into this. Things you're going to need to use a window manager. So in this case, I just had an open box, but to get into open box, you're gonna need a login manager. So like LightDM or SCDM or GDM. If you're using a desktop environment, you already have this. All you gotta do is go into here and then the arch case to the pacman dash as open box. Basically just install that. And then you can log out into your login manager and select open box as the session. And you'll be logged into a completely black screen with nothing, just a right-click menu and programs accessible. So that brings us on to the next thing. You want there to be cool things, like all transparency and effects and look at this cool doc where things grow when I put my mouse over them. To get that to work, you need a compositor. I'm using Pycom in this case. Pycom's pretty good. It's very good, very well configurable. Terminal emulator, speaking exactly of the terminal, you're gonna need something like termite. This is termite over here. You can get something like X term or for example, and X term is super minimalist and stuff, but you can configure it to look pretty good as well. You're also going to need docs and panels. Oh boy. So in this case, I have 10 to two at the top. It's literally just a doc. It's got a tray over here, system tray. It's got like an internet thing and it's got time and this stuff. You can add it with this cool configuration that has I believe it's setting. Yeah, 10 to two settings. And then you can go edit theme you can edit everything in here and stuff. You're gonna need a launcher or menu. So I mentioned that when you're kicked into Openbox and a lot of other window managers, you right click and oh, look at this. There's a bunch of things that I don't know what they are. And that happens a lot. The solution to this problem is to configure some kind of software that automatically gets your programs in here. Cause when you'll do that for the first time in Openbox, right click and you see a list of programs. Those are going to be a lot of programs and categories, which you might not even have installed in our system. So you're going to need to use something like obmenu generator, obmenu generator or there's something called menu maker or M maker for short. That's the actual command. So menu maker, both available in the arch repose or AUR. You're also finally going to need post audio. So you're going to need some kind of software to manage all your audio stuff. And if you're good, you can configure all some just great mental outlaw video called audio on Linux without a bloat or something like that. And it's a great video where he talks about how to configure also very mentally and you know, not have to use post audio but I prefer post audio. It just saves me a lot of time and also it's just the Linux audio thing. But post audio, you're probably going to need that package. If your audio just doesn't work and you're launching Openbox, you're like, oh my God, the audio doesn't work. It's probably that you don't have post audio. Anyway, here's my top tip A, read wiki pages. So this is obviously one of the obvious tips. I'm not actually a big proponent to some black man. It's essentially a piece of software that allows you to view sort of documents that explain how to use the software. So like man, man itself. So you can get a manual entry on man. So it's just manual entries for software on your computer. Now I'm not a big proponent of that. What I do like is wikis though because wikis can be adapted and they can be changed and more specifically they're much more rapidly changing in something like a manual. So I recommend the ArchWiki for everything. Pretty much every program has a page on it. It's really well written and there's a lot of information and forum posts and questions can often be outdated though. Something I was doing was searching up things like, oh, how do I get this working? And it's like a forum post in 2008 and it's not the solution I need because all those packages are out of date and they're not even used anymore and a bunch of other problems. So rely on wikis, not forum posts unless they're more recent. Top tip B, avoid desktop environment programs. So a lot of programs you may use could be part of your DE. So there is something like GwenView and it's a piece of software that basically is part of KDE as the image viewer. It's 18.79 megabytes. There's a bunch of stuff I need to install for it and it's not convenient. So you can use alternatives. So for example, I have a software called SXIV. Open up the Spaceman SXIV and I can view the image and it works perfectly fine. No need for GwenView. It's much smaller and takes up less and that's the cool thing. You get to try alternatives and lighter variants a software you may use. So that was an image viewer. You can do this for lots of other stuff. These will fit in better and will not pull as many dependencies most of the time. Some of them are built from source which sort of defeats the purpose. And you can try to go for GTK if possible. I recommend using GTK programs when possible if it even has to have GTK because sometimes it's just basic extra stuff. Oh no, my window manager looks ugly. So I mentioned before you go into open box and all you see is a black screen and you can right click and there's a bunch of text on programs you can use. It's not very beautiful. I don't think my quote unquote rice if you even call that. It's pretty awful. It's just got a panel and a dock and stuff. It's not good looking. It's minimalist I guess, quote unquote. But it's not super good looking but it looks better than just a black screen and that ugly stock open box border. So how do you actually get things to look good? Try a different theme or change GTK theme. So for example in open box, you got obconf and go in here and change themes for open box. You can have something like Alex appearance and you can change the icon theme and different icon themes and stuff. Change how things look in GTK and that's a great way to get things to look good. There's also trying somebody's dot file so going on getob or getlab and there's endless supplies of dot files or configuration files. You can change fonts and the terminal. That's the thing that I found really useful. I'm using hack as a font right now. So if I neo fetch, you'll see that it says I'm using hack 11. So at size 11 as a font because it looks really good. There's also configuring a panel better. So something like this dock for example, that may be part of making things look good. Any last words for me, you gotta have it open mind willing to learn. I started using open box around four months ago or at least tried it out four months ago and I have looked back a lot of times and have fallen back onto a DE. You're going to have to do things differently a lot of ways because desktop environments have sort of ecosystems like in plasma you get certain programs and applets and same things in GNOME, GNOME especially. It's super close and stuff. So you can always fall back onto a desktop environment if you mess up. That's why you have a login manager. You log out, you have LXDM or LightDM or SDDM or whatever and you can use those to log into your comfy desktop environment and you can stop worrying about the window manager for a second if you really have to get work done and you're not ready to configure open boxes endless amount of keyboard shortcuts. So yeah, I hope you enjoyed this little video just wanted to make that because I wanted to discuss open box so I've really been enjoying using it and goodbye.