Ooops - I forgot to mention in my Blue Period post what Window Manager I have been using. I had the post about 90% done and started playing with some of the cool new buttons in the MovableType post editor and things went haywire and I lost most of it :( I guess I forgot to add the window manager back in.
In keeping with the The Arch Way, I decided to stay away from big heavy "Desktop Environments" like KDE or GNOME and explored some of the lesser known and more lightweight Window Managers. I settled on Openbox. Not sure why exactly, as there are a plethora of choices, but Openbox seemed nicely compact and pretty popular with the Arch Linux crowd. And I haven't looked back really. It's pretty easily configurable, with a couple of XML files being the most prominent config files - rc.xml for most of the config and menu.xml for the right click menu. One particularly cool thing to use is a "pipe menu", where the results of a command build a menu on the fly. The very prolific Arch user Xyne has created obfilebrowser, which creates a menu based upon the folder you point it at, so you can use it like a little file browser. Another useful menu generation tool is menumaker, which you run once and it creates a menu.xml file for you. It scans all the "usual" places for apps, as well as having a few custom algorithms for finding those out of the way apps. Unfortunately, it seems to be abandoned, as I don't see any updates to it in several years, although it does seem to work okay.
Add the fairly lightweight and equally configurable tint2 & wbar and you've got yourself a very workable X Window environment.
In keeping with the The Arch Way, I decided to stay away from big heavy "Desktop Environments" like KDE or GNOME and explored some of the lesser known and more lightweight Window Managers. I settled on Openbox. Not sure why exactly, as there are a plethora of choices, but Openbox seemed nicely compact and pretty popular with the Arch Linux crowd. And I haven't looked back really. It's pretty easily configurable, with a couple of XML files being the most prominent config files - rc.xml for most of the config and menu.xml for the right click menu. One particularly cool thing to use is a "pipe menu", where the results of a command build a menu on the fly. The very prolific Arch user Xyne has created obfilebrowser, which creates a menu based upon the folder you point it at, so you can use it like a little file browser. Another useful menu generation tool is menumaker, which you run once and it creates a menu.xml file for you. It scans all the "usual" places for apps, as well as having a few custom algorithms for finding those out of the way apps. Unfortunately, it seems to be abandoned, as I don't see any updates to it in several years, although it does seem to work okay.
Add the fairly lightweight and equally configurable tint2 & wbar and you've got yourself a very workable X Window environment.
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