[openbox] Temporary custom openbox

Dana Jansens danakj at orodu.net
Thu Nov 12 09:22:30 EST 2009


2009/11/12 mikey <abc.mikey at googlemail.com>:
> Hi there,
>
> I'm writing a little application to start games in a second X session
> and I'm hoping to use openbox as the window manager in the second
> session. I'm hoping to be able to provide a custom setup for openbox
> just for the games session. Is it possible to specify a new set of
> config files (menu.xml, rc.xml, autostart.sh) from .xinitrc when
> openbox-session is called?

You can use the XDG_CONFIG_HOME environment variable to change where
Openbox looks for its config files.

This is how it's defined [1]: $XDG_CONFIG_HOME defines the base
directory relative to which user specific configuration files should
be stored. If $XDG_CONFIG_HOME is either not set or empty, a default
equal to $HOME/.config should be used.  This could allow/cause you to
use a different config for other applications running in that session
as well, if they look at this variable.

> If not when are these files read? Are they just accessed during
> startup or does it expect to be able to read them at any time during
> the session? If I can't use my own locations for these files I'm
> wondering if I can move out the user's .config/openbox folder and
> replace it with my own while I start openbox then once it's been
> running for a couple of seconds copy back the user's own folder.

They are read 1) at startup and 2) when you tell Openbox to "reconfigure"

Cheers,
Dana

[1] http://standards.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-0.6.html


More information about the openbox mailing list