Blackbox is a
free and open-source
Free and open-source software (FOSS) is software available under a Software license, license that grants users the right to use, modify, and distribute the software modified or not to everyone free of charge. FOSS is an inclusive umbrella term ...
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 originated as part of Project Athena at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1984. The X protocol has been at ...
.
Blackbox has specific design goals, and some functionality is provided only through other applications. One example is the bbkeys
hotkey
In computing, a keyboard shortcut (also hotkey/hot key or key binding) is a software-based assignment of an action to one or more keys on a computer keyboard. Most operating systems and applications come with a default set of keyboard shortcu ...
application.
Blackbox is written in
C++ 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 software license originating at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the late 1980s. As a permissive license, it puts very few restrictions on reuse and therefore has high license compatibility.
Unl ...
. Blackbox has compliance with the
Extended Window Manager Hints 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 ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...
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 1 ...
. Despite that, some other Linux distributions still use the original source code, as does
FreeBSD
FreeBSD is a free-software Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). The first version was released in 1993 developed from 386BSD, one of the first fully functional and free Unix clones on affordable ...
.
Features
Features of the Blackbox window manager include:
* A stacking window manager
* Written in
C++
* Freely available under the
MIT license
The MIT License is a permissive software license originating at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the late 1980s. As a permissive license, it puts very few restrictions on reuse and therefore has high license compatibility.
Unl ...
* Compliance with the Extended Window Manager Hints Specification
* Title bars have minimize,
maximize
In mathematical analysis, the maximum and minimum of a function are, respectively, the greatest and least value taken by the function. Known generically as extremum, they may be defined either within a given range (the ''local'' or ''relative' ...
, 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 d ...
*
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)
See also
*
Comparison of X window managers
References
External links
*
Blackboxat Free Software Directory
{{FOSS
Articles containing video clips
Free software programmed in C++
Free X window managers
Software using the MIT license