Fluxbox Myths Cleared Up

In the month of August I got an article called “Fluxbox – A superior window manager” published in the Linux For You magazine. I assumed that most of the things I knew about this window manager were right, till I got my article reviewed by few of the fluxbox developers themselves.

Here are a list of things I got cleared recently:

a) Blackbox themes are not likely to work in Fluxbox. (Not anymore atleast)

b) fluxconf is way beyond a recent version of Fluxbox. Using fluxconf is not from the fluxbox team and when used with a recent version messes up the config (most likely the keys file) , in a way that fluxbox becomes unusable.

c)  cd /etc/X11/fluxbox/

cp fluxbox-menu init keys ~/.fluxbox/

cd ~/.fluxbox

sudo mv fluxbox-menu menu

touch apps

All the above mentioned steps are not required. Fluxbox itself copies these files, if not you have a faulty Fluxbox.

d) Its best not to use fluxbox-generate_menu. In case you are using a Debian/Debian based distro update-menus can be used instead. fbgm is just a wild-guessing-and-checking-tool on the other hand the update-menus actually checks for programs installed and generates a menu.

e) From version 1.1.1 onwards things are a little different. For example in the keys file you will find entries like:

OnDesktop Mouse5 :prevWorkspace

OnDesktop Mouse4 :nextWorkspace

OnWindow Mod4 Mouse1 :StartMoving

OnWindow Mod4 Mouse3 :StartResizing NearestCorner

And you can do something like “if currentwindow has title Mozilla-Firefox do this otherwise do that”

Isn’t that cool .

Thats it so far. Will keep updating this page in case I get to know more.

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