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nwg

Member

Registered: 2018-04-06

Posts: 6

obhud - a Python script for handling laptop-specific keys in Openbox

Hi,

Recently I installed Openbox on older of my notebooks, and fell in love with it. However, I missed visual confirmation of pressing laptop-specific keys, as well as notification on battery and AC status changes. Firstly I used commands & notify-send in key bindings and Tint2 settings, but it didn't look well. In result, I wrote a Python script, which gathers all in several simple commands, and gives slightly gnomish UI. If you (Openbox users) could take a look at the project on GitHub, install the obhud AUR package and give some feedback, I'd be grateful.

Thanks in advance!

alfalfa

Member

Registered: 2017-06-30

Posts: 63

Website

Re: obhud - a Python script for handling laptop-specific keys in Openbox

It is indeed an interesting project, I also found the battery manager and volume control feature were kind of lacking for custom DE and decided to make my own. About your code, I would recommend to use the subprocess module rather than os.system as is it deprecated. Also, to make it less invasive, instead of modifying openbox rc file you might want to directly monitor the output of system files, or the output from the acpi package. Great name btw

nwg

Member

Registered: 2018-04-06

Posts: 6

Re: obhud - a Python script for handling laptop-specific keys in Openbox

Thank you!

I would recommend to use the subprocess module rather than os.system as is it deprecated.

The script is just a simple replacement to what I had initially written in bash + several enhancements. Surely it may be improved in many ways. Thanks for the suggestion.

Also, to make it less invasive, instead of modifying openbox rc file you might want to directly monitor the output of system files, or the output from the acpi package.

Well, I find making key bindings a daily routine in Openbox, and also one of its strongest features. The autoconfig options, aimed at lazy people, I added mostly to learn how to parse xml in Python. One can always make it manually