n00b questions

Neil Bird neil at fnxweb.com
Wed Apr 20 07:56:58 EDT 2005


   Hello all;  the sheer awful fascism that is metacity finally broke 
me.  Sawfish seems to be stagnating quite nicely, and I struggled in 
vain to rewind myself to fvwm2.  Several abortive WM installs later, and 
I find myself here.

   Very nice.

   A few questions, then, from an OpenBox newbie.  I'm running 3.3rc1 on 
FC3.


- I have a multi-button mouse, but mouse bindings seem to limit 
themselves to 'Button7'.  I've happily mapped Button8 (root menu) [and 
can in sawfish, e.g., so it's not an X issue] but nothing happens when I 
click it.

   I've spewed debug into my OB build, and the best that I can get is 
that at one point the button8 event tries to XGrabPointer & fails with 
'already grabbed'.  I've not seen this before, and it only happens with 
button 8 (the max. I have set up).  I can't see /anything/ in the source 
that's specifically limiting the no. of mouse buttons I can use;  any 
thoughts or pointers?


- I've a no. of 'multimedia' keys on my keyboard;  everything's set up 
fine so that they report  OK in xev, but my bindings don't seem to do 
anything:

         <keybind key="XF86HomePage">
             <action name="Execute"><execute>firefox</execute></action>
         </keybind>

   Should that work as it is?


- I've been having minor issues with the menu-jumping feature.  It seems 
to often leave my mouse in the wrong place, and occasionally I have to 
resort to keyboard nav. to hit a selection (although admittedly this is 
usually when using the ob_dirlist script I found to give dir. structure 
hierarchies as pipe-menus).  Maybe a fvwm-like animated movement would help,

   On a related note, would a minor (configurable) popup delay be 
feasible/appreciated?  I.e., sub-menus only appear 0.1/0.2 s. after the 
menu option is highlighted, to prevent unwanted huge sub-menus appearing 
(again, pipe-menus) when the pointer moves over them to get to the 
actual required option?


   And more philosophical questions.  I see some recent discussion about 
enhancing the theming abilities of OB.  Would allowing left/right 
borders to exist break any philosophy?  Although it has to be said, I 
don't think I'm missing them as such, except for the next thing:

   I do miss the ability to limit my window resizes to just horiz/vert 
(as usually implemented by grabbing the window edge), usually to keep 
text windows with a fixed width.  I was wondering whether that warranted 
a new set of actions, or might more cleanly be implemented by doing a 
sort of 'snapped' resize if Ctrl (say) is held while resizing (snapped 
as in: limits window resize to 90/45 degree movements from the original 
size).

   Has there been any definitive settlement as to the addition of theme 
features (e.g., png, svg or even non-rectangular windows);  or am I 
going to get shouted own for even mentioning them?  ;)


   All in all, I'm happy to be here;  a nice piece of software!

-- 
[neil at fnx ~]# rm -f .signature
[neil at fnx ~]# ls -l .signature
ls: .signature: No such file or directory
[neil at fnx ~]# exit



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