Openbox:News

After three pre-releases I made some last minute breaking and released 3.4.7, soon after which I did some last minute unbreaking and released 3.4.7.1.

You can view all the detailed changes here: http://icculus.org/openbox/index.php/Openbox:Changelog#3.4.7.1 and download it from here: http://icculus.org/openbox/index.php/Openbox:Download

The change which I suspect will cause us the most trouble is that _NET_ACTIVE_WINDOW now shows the window on the current desktop, so pagers/panels should send a desktop change message first. Probably some of them don't and people will send bug reports. Send them to the pager/panel author instead please :).

Other user noticable changes include a new default window icon and prompt windows that openbox will show on syntax errors. They can also be used to ask for confirmation before exiting or running an execute action.

The default menu.xml file has been updated to be a bit more sensible and hopefully includes more useful items now than before. Menus got some more theme settings too, you can now customize the look of separator lines, and the offset of submenus in the x- and y-dimension separately.

On the backend side, the Vertical, SplitVertical, Horizontal and Pyramid gradients got some speed impromevents, and an icon cache was introduced to reduce memory usage. Lots of small bugs were also fixed.

Have fun!

Openbox 3.4.6.1 has been released. This is a small bug-fix release that fixes a number of issues found in version 3.4.6.

It also includes updates to the new Clearlooks theme, which improve the visual look of any openbox popup dialogs.

Two small new features have found their way into this release as well:

A new <manageDesktops> option in the menu portion of rc.xml, which allows you to enable or disable the "Manage Desktops" portion of the combined-client-list-menu (Middle-click on the desktop)

For per-app settings, the <position> tag has a new attribute called "force", which lets you force a window to be positioned at the given coordinates, even if it says you asked it to go somewhere else. This gives you a way to work around buggy applications that always place themselves awkwardly without any option to do otherwise.

An example of this is:

 <position force="yes">
   <x>-0</x>
   <y>0</y>
 </position>

The full changelog is here: http://icculus.org/openbox/index.php/Openbox:Changelog#3.4.6.1

And downloads are available here: http://icculus.org/openbox/index.php/Openbox:Download#Openbox

Cheers!

Openbox 3.4.6 and ObConf 2.0.3 have been released for mass consumption!

This Openbox release introduces a new look! The Clearlooks theme has been updated to match the latest GTK Clearlooks engine. As well Openbox and ObConf are both sporting shiny new icons.

Translations have been updated for both Openbox and ObConf, as well as some new ones, including:

• New Basque translation for Openbox
• New Norwegian translation for ObConf
• New Turkish translation for ObConf

Also included in this Openbox release are a number of new features:

• The "NextWindow", "PreviousWindow", and "DirectionalFocus*" actions have two new options: "raise" and "bar". The "raise" option will temporarily raise windows to the front of the screenas you cycle through them, and the "bar" option allows you to turn off the focus cycling target indicator. These options are described in the documentation here: http://icculus.org/openbox/index.php/Help:Actions#NextWindow
• A new <monitor> option for window placement, which gives you the option to place new windows on the active monitor, or the monitor where the mouse is, instead of on any monitor (for Xinerama/TwinView multi-monitor setups)
• New options for placing the window move/resize coordinates window in a fixed position on screen, rather than relative to the window being moved or resized
• Application windows which support the appropriate protocols will now show [Not Responding] in their titlebars when the application has frozen up. By closing the window while the [Not Responding] message is visible, Openbox will kill the window's process, allowing you to kill frozen applications without dropping to the command line. If the window still won't close after the first try, a further close attempt will use kill -9.
• We added a new <wmclass> option for the execute action's startup-notification. This lets you tell Openbox that the application will map a window with the specified class - for applications that do not support startup-notification natively. This new option is desribed in the documentation here: http://icculus.org/openbox/index.php/Help:Actions#Startup_notification
• A new --config-file command line option, which can be used to load an alternate configuration file. ObConf 2.0.3 will automatically open the same configuration file.

For Openbox 3.4.6, we have also made a large number of usability improvements under the hood, especially for Xinerama/TwinView desktops, and fixed a number of bugs.

The ObConf 2.0.3 release has a whole new look, with the tabs moved over to the side of the window. This release adds support for all of the latest features introduced in Openbox 3.4.4, 3.4.5, and 3.4.6.

Full changelogs can be found here:

Openbox - http://icculus.org/openbox/index.php/Openbox:Changelog#3.4.6

ObConf - http://icculus.org/openbox/index.php/ObConf:Changelog#2.0.3

Downloads are available from the website: http://icculus.org/openbox/index.php/Openbox:Download

Openbox 3.4.5 released.

This release fixes some very minor memory leaks, updates Finnish, Russian, German and French translations, adds a new Hungarian translation, fixes a crash when trying to access the More... menu of client-list-combined-menu and some minor bug fixes.

Downloads are available from the website: http://icculus.org/openbox/index.php/Openbox:Download

Openbox 3.4.4 is ready for action.

This release largely focuses on bug-fixes, with a few brand new things:

• The vertical and horizontal padding sizes can now be specified independently in themes (See http://icculus.org/openbox/index.php/Help:Themes#window.client.padding.height)
• A notification is now displayed when you switch desktops, similar to the old desktop switching dialog. You can configure how long it appears for, or turn it off if you want. This option will be presented in the next ObConf release.
• New focus stealing prevention that doesn't suck. It seemed like it couldn't be done, but now focus stealing prevention should only trigger if you are actually, actively, working in another window.

On top of these, a large number of bug fixes and usability improvements have been added. You can read the full changelog here: http://icculus.org/openbox/index.php/Openbox:Changelog#3.4.4

Downloads are available from the website: http://icculus.org/openbox/index.php/Openbox:Download