![]() ![]() Building a desktop this way follows the Unix Methodology have software that each does one thing well, and when you put them together, you get something amazing. When I first installed Arch, I had several choices. I tried xfce and gnome as my desktop environments. While both of them have their pros and cons, I ended up liking none. The sole reason was the dependencies these two software bring with them. My only intention of installing Arch was to have something, which I control, not like Ubuntu, where you are forced to use the preinstalled software and when you try to uninstall something, you fear of breaking some other program. So I end up going the route of building something up from scratch using Openbox as a base. At this point, I have a fast, lightweight desktop that is exceptionally stable and is genuinely my desktop as I have built it from the ground up, choosing every application.Īfter the installation of Arch, the first thing I did was to install openbox, a tiling window manager. You may also try other window managers like awesome, i3, and fluxbox, etc. but I chose Openbox because it is used everywhere. ![]() Thus there is a plethora of information out there about customizing it.įor our window manager to show up, it needs to be added either in a login manager or user’s ~/.xinitrx file. There is a default version of this file that contain some code which we may want to retain, so rather than making this file from scratch, copy the default version of the file to the user’s home directory. The type and behavior of Openbox menus, accessible by right-clicking the background, can be changed using ~/.config/openbox/menu.xml file. Openbox provides two kinds of menus, Static, and Dynamic menus (Piped and Generators) Static menus are hardcoded in XML and is stored in the menu.xml file. Whenever you install a new application, you will have to update the XML file to update the menu manually. It is a viable solution if the apps are not installed on a day to day basis. Pipe menus are the sections of the Openbox menu that Openbox creates on the fly by running a generic script and using its plain text output as menu entries. This scheme can be used in different ways, like adding a mail checker in the menu or adding a weather forecast menu. ![]() You can check openbox pipe menu page for more information. ![]() Generators are the most convenient type of menus. These can be found in most desktop environments where applications show up in the menu automatically. If applications are being installed regularly, then this will probably be the preferred choice. The process of making these menus can be automated by static menu generator like obmenu. It will generate static menus from installed applications by looking into certain directories. Others available tools are menumaker, obmenu and xdg-menu. Dynamic Menus #ĭynamic menus give the same kind of functionality most people are used to. They can be used to generate full, complex menus on the fly. One of the most popular application for generating dynamic menus is obmenu-generator (AUR). Though it is not officially connected to Openbox, it is widely used. ![]()
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