[openbox] openbox vs. fluxbox

[Christian]

On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 07:55:45PM -0400, Dana Jansens wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 02:29:10PM EDT, openbox at cstuck.ath.cx wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > I recently switched from fluxbox to openbox - mostly because fluxbox does not recognize my "arrow-up" key any more - no clue why.
> > I really enjoy using openbox bc it has nice features I miss in fluxbox.
> > 
> > BUT:
> > There are really great features in fluxbox I absolutely miss in openbox!
> > Maybe other people can agree and might want to work on that in the future.
> > I guess some should not be so hard to implement.
> > 
> > 
> > 1) Focus model: Bot WM can set the focus model to "floppy-mouse" so the focus stays under the mouse when another window appears underneath it. The nice thing in fluxbox at this point is that I can tell it not to raise the window, once I clicked in it - which is really nice when you have a terminal in front of your web browser, want to select something without the terminal to disappear... only to show one example
> 
> You can do this, you just have to change your mouse bindings.  They are actually lot more flexible in Openbox.
> 
> > 2) Transparency: Every now and then I turn on transparency with xcompmgr and use transset to change it on the fly. In fluxbox I can set a general setting for transparency for focused and unfocused windows. This way all unfocused windows can be set to low opacity. Once your mouse moves over another window, it appears and the old one gets the unfocused transparency. This gives me a good overview of the windows I have open and other cool features.
> 
> I have an xcompmgr fork that let's you set menu transparency.  wmctrl would probably let you change transparency of other windows based on focus.
So far I don't get how wmctrl should help me with that... I'd guess enter/leave bindings or actions taken on focus-change are needed for this?
But that's what is missing, as you said below :(

Would be great though to have, so you might wanna keep that in mind ;)

If you have any advice with that i'd be glad though.


christian


> 
> > 2b) Also can I set transparency for the menu in fluxbox
> > 
> > 3) It is possible to shade windows. On fluxbox I could set shaded windows to unshade, when the mouse is over their titlebar and go back to shade when the mouse leaves the window.
> 
> Right now you'd have to use mouse wheel or some kind of key/mouse binding to shade/unshade, as we don't have enter/leave bindings - something that might be nice to add.
> 
> > 4) It is nice to set window specific settings in openbox. Fluxbox has also the option to save the current window settings so when I set a window to save it's position and close it, it will appear at the same position again when I reopen it - of course only when I set the "save window settings on close" option.
> 
> Openbox doesn't write to the rc.xml at all and the model or whatnot is such that it won't change easily.  In the future I can see this being addressed, long term, but for now you have to edit the rc.xml to save config things - obconf does a lot of this, but not app settings.
> 
> > I know that openbox is not that far away from fluxbox since they both came out of blackbox, right?
> 
> Nope, in style/themes only.
> 
> > So there might be a way to combine the cool features of openbox with some of fluxbox? A response would be awesome!
> 
> Dana
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