Software > Window managers >

(on Wikipedia)
http://www.fluxbox.org/

A light window manager. Based on Blackbox. Not bad, but not as good as Blackbox. I liked Openbox more than this.

Blackbox has been obsoleted six ways from Sunday. See versus Blackbox.

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• ~2009-04? - (version not recorded) on Slackware (version not recorded)

  • Possibly Slackware 12.2 on VirtualBox (version not recorded)
• 2007-04-21 - 0.9.15.1 on (distribution not recorded)
• 2007-03-04 - 0.9.9 on (distribution not recorded)
• 2005-09-13 - 0.61.1 on PCLinuxOS Sep '05

• 2005-09-03 - (version not recorded) on Slackware (version not recorded)

~2009-04? - (version not recorded) ∞

Tested perhaps around 2009-04 as I was doing a lot of window manager testing around then.

I prefer Openbox. Fluxbox has some annoyances with resizing from any corners. Tabbing is a great feature, but useless to the way I work.

Argh, the default Slackware install of Fluxbox got b0rked by my Awesome window manager installation attempt. Boo.

2007-04-21 - 0.9.15.1 ∞

I turned the slit off. Now how do I turn it back on? Oh, it's called the "toolbar"..

• The scroll wheel doesn't work
• The fourth/fifth mouse clicks don't work to go back/forth in Firefox. I'd bet they're not working at all.
• Has no opaque resize

• Items appear way too large in the tray. There should be a maximum width for programs listed there. =/

Skype now appears in the tray!

2007-03-04 - 0.9.9 ∞

• Kmix and KGPG are displayed in Fluxbox's bottom bar, but I need to use docker for Skype. Except docker floats overtop of the bar in an unintelligent way.
• I cannot alt-right-click to change the proportions of a screen from the top-right, top-left or bottom-left. That sucks.

• When I show window contents while dragging, it really bogs things down. Sad.

2005-09-13 - 0.61.1 ∞

I've come to the conclusion that Fluxbox is clearly inferior to Blackbox. See versus Blackbox. Some functionality is misplaced or missing. Things just feel clumsy with Fluxbox compared to the original. The only single bit of functionality I like in Fluxbox is fluxbox-generate_menu. I'm going to look a lot harder for a replacement.

2005-09-03 - (version not recorded) ∞

I've decided against contrib to PCLinuxOS in preference for some style-hacking. I love Blackbox and it's clearly superior to Fluxbox, but since Fluxbox is what PCLinuxOS supports I'll go for that. This is in keeping with various desires and philosophies which I have yet to articulate.

Note to self: Nuking the window manager brings everything crashing down. :) I need to find a way to more easily swap the window manager.. but I think I might settle into Fluxbox easily enough. Styles seem compatible, and I hope to be able to use bbkeys because I like being able to throw windows to different virtual screens easily.

Fluxbox tips and tricks ∞

• You can change the hotkeys or style and then use the menu to reload or restart.

menus:

• left-click on the root to get one menu
• right-click on the root to get another menu

• right-click on a title to get a window menu

• If you have windows filling the screen and you can't see the root, you can use the edge of the screen instead of the root.

tabbed windows:

• middle-click on a titlebar and drag it into the body of another window to merge the two windows. Then you can right-click on one of the items and drag it out to separate them later.

Fluxbox customization ∞

.fluxbox/keys for hotkeys.

Mod1 Tab :NextWindow
Mod1 Shift Tab :PrevWindow
Mod1 1 :Workspace 1
Mod1 2 :Workspace 2
Mod1 3 :Workspace 3
Mod1 4 :Workspace 4

Issues

• Alt-Tab and such don't pull up a nice listing of what's there.. it's just a harsh window change. It's terrible.

• I understand there's no hotkey to send a window to a specific workspace. That really sucks. bbkeys can do this and it works with flux.

You can steal (old) blackbox bbkeys settings with convertkeys

Fluxbox styles ∞

.fluxbox/init holds a string which points to the style file.

Fluxbox v0.1.14 is compatible with the Blackbox 0.6 styles, and not 0.7 styles.