Submitted by A new release of Blackbox in the latest 0.70 series is now out: 0.70.1 cumulates new features and bugfixes added to CVS over the last 8 months. Read on for a list of the most notable changes.
Here is a list of the most notable changes:
- Fixed compilation on OpenBSD, Mac OS X.
- Updated included documentation.
- Implemented FDO basedir.
- Added window-to-window and window-to-center snap. Window-to-window is off by default, you need to set session.windowSnapThreshold to a positive number in your ~/.blackboxrc.
- Added config options for additional mouse-wheel operations.
- Implemented pipe menus, which render the output of a command as menus on the fly.
- Improved focus-last-window-on-workspace.
- Improved placement of dialog and desktop type windows.
- Users can override the styles rootCommand in their rc (session.rootCommand). This allows you to retain your preferences or prevent a malicious rootCommand in a 3rd-party style.
- Better default colors when no style.
- Shaded+maximized windows don’t dissapear after restart anymore.
- Access window menus with Mod4+right mouse.
- Fullscreen now ignores aspect ratios. This will hopefully fix, by force, movie players which set both fulscreen and ratio properties.
- Supressed the (in)famous pixmap cache messages on the console.
- Many bugfixes — see the complete changelog.
The official website has accumulated a lot of useful information as well in the meantime. Please use the FAQ, it answers many common questions.
Blackbox is dead before turning production ready. Hilarious and pityful.
awsome, my favorite WM is still growing. for a while i thought we had lost u.
Hell, it would be better to be stuck with twm than use Blackbox…
In 5 years they have advanced to a patch level.
This is cool, I for the last year thought blackbox was dead – I thought fluxbox was a continuation, not a fork
You thought right. Install E16.
Blackbox is dead before turning production ready. This is hilarious and pityful.
Why is this double posted?
Because you’re just unable to accept the fact that it’s dead. You and the other 3 Blackbox users.
Yes, because it’s dead (never mind they just released something) nobody’s allowed to like it any more.
Right.
Exactly. You can’t possibly like it. It’s dead and stinks. Do yourself a favour and install E16. Thank you.
Do everyone else a favor and install Windows ME unpatched.
Better yet. Install FreeBSD and put Blackbox on top of it for a perfect undead zombie system.
I actually thought this was a good joke, why moderate it down?
It’s good to see this feature, it’s something I just can’t live without in floating window managers. Besides that (and window memory ala Devil’s Pie or E16’s Remember) Blackbox seemed to get it just about right with 0.7
I wish someone would adopt bbtools
what do u hav against blackbox? personally its the only out of the box wm i can install and keep my sanity. everything else is bloated, a pain in the but to configure to anything usable, or ugly at best.
blackbox is my favorite, fluxbox and evolution being good. then i spose xfce, and sumwhere just above completly unusable i would stick gnome, kde being completly unusable without more work then is tolerable.
blackbox is my favorite, fluxbox and evolution being good. then i spose xfce, and sumwhere just above completly unusable i would stick gnome, kde being completly unusable without more work then is tolerable.
you aren’t differentiating between wm’s and de’s… kde’s wm has a few more features than metacity; at least, that are enabled by default or that are easily configurable.
my favorite window manager is xfwm4: attractive themes, excellent defaults, and it has all of the quirky features that I use often (mouse wheel for window shading, alt left & right clicks). As it turns out, its not particularly well written (or at least, tests have shown it to be pretty slow), but as long as it *feels* quick (which it does), i really don’t mind it taking a few extra cycles.
right now (and for the past few months) i am using xfwm4 with kde and i am happy with the ballance of features, configurability, and performance.
Why use blackbox when openbox and fluxbox are available?
I’m not saying that I think fluxbox or openbox are the best possible window managers. Just that I can’t believe anyone would think blackbox was superior.
it’s not about superiority, the _point_ is to have a lightweight window manager.
blackbox is perfect for me… i dont need any further features added to it… (just patches)
Edited 2005-11-03 18:43
Exactly how I feel…
Anyhow, BB now implements piped menu, a feature I was eagerly waiting for.
At some stage I was so desperate that I even started to hack it in myself …
I use Blackbox as my only WM, and I’ve tried ALL of them. from Gnome and KDE all the way down to Ratpoison. Blackbox gives me only what I want and nothing more. I think it’s perfect.
Blackbox hasn’t “advanced” because it has all the features the author wanted!
Gnome and KDE are not window managers. They include window managers along with the other applictions which make up their respective desktop environments. Metacity and KWM. So long as Blackbox implements the same standards (probably safe to assume it does) used by Metacity and KWM then you can use it in a Gnome/KDE desktop instead of their default window managers.
I couldn’t view their changelog; the page timed out. Does anyone know what changed?
I used to use BB for several years but now currently use IceWM. However I can use any WM fine if screen is availabe. It’s surprising to see so many debates over WM’s and DE’s and yet not too many credits to the incredibly useful screen.
Anyone know if tear-off menus have been readded? It was in the TODO file for 0.70.0 so I’m hoping it made it in this release though I don’t see it in the changelog
I find it hard to decide between Blackbox and Fluxbox. At the moment I lean towards Blackbox (with bbkeys) because it seems more stable than Fluxbox, but this might change once Fluxbox reaches 1.0 release. I like the built-in feature set in Fluxbox but the stability varies a lot between different Fluxbox releases while Blackbox has always been very reliable. Anyway, it’s Blackbox or Fluxbox for me — so far I haven’t much liked Openbox. But if Openbox becomes easier to configure (possibly with a gui config tool), then it will be a tough decision between the three *boxes.
It’s not technically a *box, but you might want to look into PekWM as it’s quite similar. It’s still quite early in development, though.