Why do people prefer openbox over xfwm?

ARaCHnid · 2019-06-30 00:38:11

It seems openbox and xfwm are very popular around these parts, with openbox being the most popular. Any ideas as to why openbox is more popular? They're very similar projects - both written in C, similar LOC.

I use xfwm because it has the ability to tile-snap to corners of the screen, openbox doesn't.

Not trying to bash openbox here, just wanting to make sure I'm not missing out on anything by not using openbox.

duaner · 2019-06-30 02:28:00

Frequently, when someone gets sick of gnome and kde's shenanigans, they get directed to LXDE, which uses openbox by default. As I recall, I skipped that stage and went directly to openbox on Ubuntu, after I saw a reference to it. I don't have much use for tiling, so openbox still does everything I need.

Lone_Wolf · 2019-06-30 12:12:07

Openbox is stand alone, xfwm is part of a DE

xfwm has it's own compositor, openbox doesn't.
I don't care about shadows and transparency so don't need any compositor
Also I've had problems with tearing when using compositors that went away when disabling the compositor.

While xfwm itself doesn't depend on GTK , it's dependencies do.
Openbox doesn't need any toolkit that isn't part of Xorg as far as i know

berbae · 2019-07-01 08:59:28

I use Openbox because I like the total freedom to configure it to my likings, to choose what I want on the screen and where.
Openbox doesn't prevent to use Gnome or KDE applis as I prefer, or DE independent applis.
So it's perfect for me at the moment.

ARaCHnid · 2019-07-01 09:49:33

Openbox does sound good, and looking through the code it does look (slightly) cleaner than xfwm, although they're both really high quality projects, not often I find C code that feels kind of artisanal.

I might put in a feature request for openbox to tile-snap to corners of the screen, so far it seems like it's the only feature missing.

Edit: sp

Last edited by ARaCHnid (2019-07-01 10:09:06)

karabaja4 · 2019-07-01 10:27:26

Honestly I never tried xfwm standalone. Openbox is extremely easy to setup, with just putting "exec openbox-session" in .xinitrc, putting the stuff you want to run in "$HOME/.config/openbox/autostart.sh" and just run from there.

Is it possible to do the same with xfwm?

Trilby · 2019-07-01 11:59:49

Openbox can snap to corners. You just need to configure it. The strength of OB is that you can configure it to do nearly anything and look however you want. If you're just comparing OB's default behavior out-of-the-box (pun intended) then it would hardly measure up to any other WM.

seth · 2019-07-01 13:05:00

While one should be able to eg. configure a shortcut to program the window geometry, I assume when he talks "snapping" he's referring to the "aero snap" feature and not the edge resistance.

Trilby · 2019-07-01 13:18:14

That's what I'm talking about too. I had OB set up for that back when I used it.

ARaCHnid · 2019-07-02 10:07:01

Trilby wrote:

That's what I'm talking about too. I had OB set up for that back when I used it.

Any tips? I've done some googling and all I could find was this thread:

https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1796793

in the thread he talks about doing it via keyboard shortcuts only.

To clarify, yep I'm talking about "aero" snap as seth suggested, where you can press mouse down on the titlebar, then drag the mouse to one of the corners in order to tile (as a quarter) into that corner. You can also drag to the top of the screen to maximize, or to the side of the screen to make it half the size of the screen. So not just edge snap but tiling.

Even though using the mouse is unfashionable these days and I'm mostly a keyboard fanatic, I do occasionally use the mouse.

karabaja4 wrote:

Honestly I never tried xfwm standalone. Openbox is extremely easy to setup, with just putting "exec openbox-session" in .xinitrc, putting the stuff you want to run in "$HOME/.config/openbox/autostart.sh" and just run from there.
Is it possible to do the same with xfwm?

I've only tried in Debian I admit, but it was no big deal. It did bring in a couple of minor dependencies from xfce (libxfce4ui, libxfce4util, libxfconf), but didn't require the whole thing.

Trilby · 2019-07-02 11:21:17

I can't find any documentation for it now, but openbox has/had conditionals for the rc.xml (i.e., <if> blocks) which could be used for this. But it's been many years since I was using it.

karabaja4 · 2019-07-02 11:31:24

ARaCHnid wrote:

I've only tried in Debian I admit, but it was no big deal. It did bring in a couple of minor dependencies from xfce (libxfce4ui, libxfce4util, libxfconf), but didn't require the whole thing.

I don't mind the dependencies, I'm just wondering how would I configure standalone xfwm in .xinitrc and start of bunch of apps with it...

seth · 2019-07-02 12:57:51

There's https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/opensnap/ - I'm personally not conviced that the behavior can be implemented in openbox itself (requiring at least some mouse position conditional)
Also see https://github.com/lawl/opensnap/issues … t-23666097

Trilby · 2019-07-02 13:17:45

Ah, there's the conditional. I kept looking for <if> type syntaxes (syntaces?) in the documentation, I missed the <action name="if">.

I do have to admit to not having tinkered with this in many years, and memory being the faulty process it can be I could be mistaken, however I am certain that I did have this behavior in openbox some time ago, and I suspect that it did not require any additional tools/add-ons. This suspicion is where my memory could be wrong, but it is also based on self-knowledge: I was certainly inspired by complex add-ons but would have set out on a pursuit of trying to replicate the behavior with just OBs built in options. I think I was successful with the conditional syntax paired with mouse binings.

But, as they say, the proof is in the pudding, and my pudding has long since expired and been discarded.

Last edited by Trilby (2019-07-02 13:18:43)

ARaCHnid · 2019-07-03 00:10:58

seth wrote:

There's https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/opensnap/ - I'm personally not conviced that the behavior can be implemented in openbox itself (requiring at least some mouse position conditional)
Also see https://github.com/lawl/opensnap/issues … t-23666097

Amazing that someone managed to get it to work using EWMH, would never have thought to do that...

karabaja4 wrote:

I don't mind the dependencies, I'm just wondering how would I configure standalone xfwm in .xinitrc and start of bunch of apps with it...

I didn't actually seem to need to edit .xinitrc, just installed xfwm4 and it started itself on startx automagically. Mind you this was on debian so arch might be different. If doesn't work it might just be a case of adding an "exec xfwm4" in the right place.

Arch Linux

#1 2019-06-30 00:38:11

Why do people prefer openbox over xfwm?

#2 2019-06-30 02:28:00

Re: Why do people prefer openbox over xfwm?

#3 2019-06-30 12:12:07

Re: Why do people prefer openbox over xfwm?

#4 2019-07-01 08:59:28

Re: Why do people prefer openbox over xfwm?

#5 2019-07-01 09:49:33

Re: Why do people prefer openbox over xfwm?

#6 2019-07-01 10:27:26

Re: Why do people prefer openbox over xfwm?

#7 2019-07-01 11:59:49

Re: Why do people prefer openbox over xfwm?

#8 2019-07-01 13:05:00

Re: Why do people prefer openbox over xfwm?

#9 2019-07-01 13:18:14

Re: Why do people prefer openbox over xfwm?

#10 2019-07-02 10:07:01

Re: Why do people prefer openbox over xfwm?

#11 2019-07-02 11:21:17

Re: Why do people prefer openbox over xfwm?

#12 2019-07-02 11:31:24

Re: Why do people prefer openbox over xfwm?

#13 2019-07-02 12:57:51

Re: Why do people prefer openbox over xfwm?

#14 2019-07-02 13:17:45

Re: Why do people prefer openbox over xfwm?

#15 2019-07-03 00:10:58

Re: Why do people prefer openbox over xfwm?

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