Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, ...

computing, Blackbox is a

free and open-source Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...

stacking window manager A stacking window manager (also called floating window manager) is a window manager that draws and allows windows to overlap, without using a compositing algorithm. All window managers that allow the overlapping of windows but are not compositing ...

for the

X Window System The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems. X provides the basic framework for a GUI environment: drawing and moving windows on the display device and interacting wi ...

. Blackbox has specific design goals, and some functionality is provided only through other applications. One example is the bbkeys

hotkey computing, a keyboard shortcut also known as hotkey is a series of one or several keys to quickly invoke a software program or perform a preprogrammed action. This action may be part of the standard functionality of the operating system o ...

application. Blackbox is written in

C++ C++ (pronounced "C plus plus") is a high-level general-purpose programming language created by Danish computer scientist Bjarne Stroustrup as an extension of the C programming language, or "C with Classes". The language has expanded significan ...

and contains completely original code. It was created by Bradley T. Hughes and is available under the

MIT License The MIT License is a permissive free software license originating at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the late 1980s. As a permissive license, it puts only very limited restriction on reuse and has, therefore, high license comp ...

. Blackbox has compliance with the

Extended Window Manager Hints Extended Window Manager Hints, a.k.a. NetWM, is an X Window System standard for the communication between window managers and applications. It builds on the functionality of the Inter-Client Communication Conventions Manual (ICCCM). These standard ...

specification. The original author seems to have ceased updating the repository with the exception of a minor fix of compilation problems in 2015, leaving the last original version at 0.70.1. However an actively maintained fork by Brian Bidulock has been picked up by several

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, whi ...

distributions in its place, and it is featured in

pkgsrc pkgsrc (''package source'') is a package management system for Unix-like operating systems. It was forked from the FreeBSD ports collection in 1997 as the primary package management system for NetBSD. Since then it has evolved independently; in 19 ...

. Despite that, some other Linux distributions still use the original source code, as does

FreeBSD FreeBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), which was based on Research Unix. The first version of FreeBSD was released in 1993. In 2005, FreeBSD was the most popular ...

Features

Features of the Blackbox window manager include: * A stacking window manager * Written in

* Freely available under the

MIT license The MIT License is a permissive free software license originating at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the late 1980s. As a permissive license, it puts only very limited restriction on reuse and has, therefore, high license comp ...

* Compliance with the Extended Window Manager Hints Specification * Title bars have minimize,

maximize In mathematical analysis, the maxima and minima (the respective plurals of maximum and minimum) of a function, known collectively as extrema (the plural of extremum), are the largest and smallest value of the function, either within a given r ...

, and close buttons * Support for simple themes * Support for color changes * No support for desktop shortcuts * Compatibility with both KDE and GNOME

Related projects

There are a number of other window manager forks of Blackbox: *

Fluxbox Fluxbox is a stacking window manager for the X Window System, which started as a fork of Blackbox 0.61.1 in 2001, with the same aim to be lightweight. Its user interface has only a taskbar, a pop-up menu accessible by right-clicking on the des ...

* Hackedbox * Openbox (until version 3.0)

Windows shell replacements

Although they do not share the same codebase, these projects are also inspired by Blackbox. * BB4Win (the first and most prominent clone/port of Blackbox on Windows) * bbLean * xoblite (has releases from 2021) * bbZero (a branch of bbLean)

References

External links

*
Blackbox
at Free Software Directory Articles containing video clips Free software programmed in C++ Free X window managers Software using the MIT license {{Unix-stub

Features

Related projects

Windows shell replacements

See also

References

External links