Blackbox

Blackbox is an open source and freely distributed software project that has been designed from the ground up to act as a standalone or integrated window manager in the style of the more popular Openbox and Fluxbox projects. It is a lightweight and low on resources WM (Window Manager) that has no annoying library dependencies.

It’s similar to Fluxbox and Openbox

As mentioned, Blackbox is similar to Fluxbox and Openbox, in both functionality and appearance. This means that it can be used on top of an a desktop environment or as a standalone window manager on top of X11. It comprises of a single panel that can be placed either on top or on the bottom edge of the screen, allowing users to cycle between virtual workspaces, interact with running programs, as well as to access essential system functions. It features a right-click context menu that acts as a Main Menu.

Desktop environment compatibility

The Blackbox window manager is fully compatible with your current desktop environment, as it can be easily used as a drop-in replacement for any other open-source window manager. While it has been successfully tested with GNOME and KDE desktops, it should also work well with Xfce, LXDE, Cinnamon, MATE, and other DEs.

Supported operating systems

Officially supported GNU/Linux operating systems include Debian, Fedora, Arch Linux, Gentoo and Slackware. However, Blackbox is also known to work well on the Mac OS X operating system. Both 64-bit and 32-bit architectures are supported at this time.

Under the hood and availability

A quick look under the hood will show us that Blackbox is written entirely in the C++ programming language and requires only a functional X Window System (X11). It is available for download only as a universal source tarball, but it can be easily installed from the default software repositories of many GNU/Linux distributions.

What is new in this release:

• fix compilation on OpenBSD and Mac OS X
• documentation updates to data/README.menu
• fix bt::Timer to make sure it still works after daylight-savings changes
• fix horizontal text alignment by adding a small indent to all text
• fix sunken gradient rendering: the colors are no longer inverted, and the correct bevel is drawn
• add bt::XDG::BaseDir, which is an implementation of the freedesktop.org basedir-spec version 0.6
• make bt::Pen able to recover from cache faults
• silence messages from bt::PixmapCache about the cache maximum being exceeded
• add bt::Rect::inside(), which ensures that one rectangle is inside the other
• fix bt::Resource to do nothing if filename arguments are empty
• fix bt::Resource::merge() to stop overriding existing entries (it should only add new ones)
• add bt::Texture::textureResource() overload that returns a default texture if the resource cannot be found
• add bt::dirname(), which returns the directory part of a file path
• add bt::mkdirhier(), which is equivalent to 'mkdir -m mode -p path'
• add bt::tolower(), which returns a string with all characters lowercase
• add the "Center Placement" window placement policy, which places all new windows in the center of the screen
• add "Shade Window with Mouse Wheel" and "Toolbar Actions with Mouse Wheel" configuration options
• add window-to-window snapping support. This feature is off by default, you need to set session.windowSnapThreshold to a positive number in your ~/.blackboxrc.
• add support for piped menus. The output of a command can be used to create the blackbox menu. This is done by prepending the pipe character, |, to session.menuFile in ~/.blackboxrc or to [include] filenames.
• [nop] menu entries are now drawn disabled
• fix "Focus Last Window on Workspace" behavior to stop preferring windows that occupy all workspaces
• window placement takes windows with Desktop and Dialog types into consideration and does the appropriate thing (instead of placing them normally)
• remove 1 pixel gaps between windows when doing smart placement
• allow users to override the style's rootCommand in their ~/.blackboxrc
• fix default colors used by blackbox when no style is found
• allow the Toolbar to be raised and lowered with Alt+LeftMouseButton and Alt+MiddleMouseButton, respectively
• fix maximized+shaded windows from disappearing when restarting blackbox
• each window's windowmenu can be accessed now with Mod4+RightMouseButton
• fix fullscreen support to ignore aspect ratios set by applications (specifically, this should fix movie players that are currently displaying 16:9 video on a 4:3 screen)
• fix support for _NET_MOVERESIZE_WINDOW, normally sent from pagers
• fix focus problems caused by applications that try to fake fullscreen by setting focus to an override-redirect window (e.g. rdekstop)