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Blackbox (Finally) Updated

Posted by timothy on from the occasional-and-careful dept.

mpeg4codec writes "OSNews reported earlier this month that the lightweight Blackbox window manager has been updated to 0.70. Among the new features are EWMH compliance, anti-aliased fonts, unicode support, and backwards compatibility with previous versions' styles. Of course, it brings you all these new features (well, some are optional) while retaining its small binary size, small memory footprint, and short list of dependencies. I for one think it's about time."

3 of 311 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Sorry, you are just to slow moving for me by Jameth · · Score: 5, Informative

    Well, Blackbox is a little different. First off, Blackbox is a window manager. KDE is a DE, hence the DE in the name. KWin doesn't really get all that many bugs. It's had a total of about a thousand in three years, about one a day. And most of those didn't matter.

    It is also important to note that I have never had BB crash. Never. I don't use it anymore, I use KDE. However, when I ran BB for about a year, it never crashed. I occasionally got bothered with having to add everything I wanted manually and having trouble configuring it, but there weren't any 'bugs', just wishlist type items. BB really has been stable basically forever because it has always had an extremely precise goal that was well scoped from the start.

    And as for this not mattering to many users, BB is one of the landmark WMs, truly. Just look at how many people use the BB forks. It's one of the all-time favorite WMs out there, and even today, after all this time, is the best looking. It definitely is newsworthy when BB gets a new release.

  2. Re:It's about time? by abiessu · · Score: 5, Informative

    "... no rush to upgrade... "

    Normally I'd agree. In this case, blackbox being as lightweight as it is, and having very little in the way of external dependencies, I went for the upgrade as soon as I saw it. Not a mistake per se, except that almost none of the stock styles work properly (read: invisible menu text, font/border/margin sizes changing wildly). Fortunately, one of the stock styles still worked well enough to navigate. I drilled through the new wiki site to find the 'full example' style for 0.70 and dropped that in. The second unfortunate turn is that the full example also has the invisible text problem. After about an hour of tweaking and paring down it was usable, but the whole experience leaves me with, "yep, you're right to hold off on this one."

    Of course, it's possible that there are some conflicts with old (0.65) files on that box...

    --
    Let S_n = {nst+us+vt : s,t in Z \ {0}, u,v in {-1,1}}. For all n in Z where |n| > 2, Z \ S_n is infinite... right?
  3. BB for windows by BrookHarty · · Score: 5, Informative

    I like how I can use Blackbox for windows and use the same themes.
    http://www.bb4win.org/news.php

    People walk up and seem me using rxvt from cygwin and bb4win and they dont realize im in windows, till I open Exchange. :)