I have been using fluxbox for about 2 months till now. and I shifted over to fluxbox from xfce 4.2 and fluxbox seemed a lot faster then xfce.
Yesterday i installed Openbox 3 and It seems faster then Fluxbox. After spending a few hours customising OpenBox i am pretty happy.

So i want to know what are the disadvantages of using Openbox over fluxbox, cause the popularity of fluxbox is a lot higher then fluxbox.
One reason might be easily editable config files in fluxbox, but apart from that are there any other reasons

openbox is standards compliant

What do you mean by standards compliant?

compliant with window manager standards such as wm hints and netwm -means that apps work as they are supposed to, no matter what window manager you use.

OpenBox +'s
*) has pipe menus which lets you pipe any command/program text output into the menu
*) prompt Action built-in (don't need a script like you do for fluxbox)
*) Standards compliant, fits in nicely with KDE, GNOME

OpenBox -'s
*) lots of typing for xml files - (some tools exist to alleviate this)
*) No icons in the root menu
*) No AutoArrange action (at least not that I know of)

FLuxbox +'s
*) Has grouping/tabbing
*) easy to configure text files
*) Has AutoArrange action
*) can rebuild with imlib2 support (for root menu icon support)
*) already in Slackware

FLuxbox -'s
*) no popup when switching windows or workspaces
*) needs expanded windows list on middle click

Out of the box Openbox is even more stripped down than fluxbox since it doesn't have a task bar, clock, etc. You will need to add such a panel if it is desired.
For building Openbox - Openbox SlackBuild
For rebuilding Fluxbox -Fluxbox SlackBuild

I've been using IceWM since a month now on my P3 and I like it a lot, more than Fluxbox. Very fast, highly configurable and with a few neat features!
No experience with OpenBox though...
I did find a topic about the pro's and cons of OB and Fluxbox here, maybe something for you?

I appreciate the link. It didn't really have anything that I didn't already know, though. Contrary to what was said in the thread, OpenBox is not the lightweight of the pair. In my experience I found it used twice as much memory as fluxbox even though I have icons in my root menu in fluxbox (and not Openbox)! Granted, it still only weighed in at about 10MB (fluxbox being about 5MB). If you want a panel then you have to add one to Openbox (which is maybe why some people said it was more "lightweight"), but fluxbox already has a minimal one. pypanel and fbpanel, a couple of good panel choices actually use more memory than fluxbox!

I thought about trying out IceWM, but I don't like the style as much as fluxbox/openbox and it does not seem as configurable. How much memory does it use on your machine?

You might try WindowMaker. I've been using it for years now. It uses slightly more memory than fluxbox, bit starts much quicker. I think it has the best behaviour out-of-box. Strangely, I don't like using its' most notable feature -the Dock. But I like and use sveral DockApps anyway. I worked out how to suppress the Dock and Clip and still use DockApps. I also don't like the mini-windows, so I supress that also and use a panel with it. I also use the ROX-Filer so I have drag-n-drop desktop icons.
I now run a PIII 700MHz machine so I don't need to be so stingy as I used to be. Still, on my website you can find lots of alternatives which are truly lightweight -mostly needing only GTK-1.2. I don't use openbox since it needs GTK2 and for the same reason I use an old (pathced) version of ROX-Filer which works with GTK-1.2. Anything which needs GTK2 is going to be significantly slower, as well as neeing about 180MB of 'extra' libs.

Nearly any panel will need at least 5-7MB of memory which is about what most light window manage4rs will use. If you are running a machine with only 64MB of RAM you'll really notice the difference between the different programs.
Anyway, on my site you'll find over a dozen window managers, some of which you probably never heard of, plus there are several panels, run-boxes, menu-programs and other similar items for building your own lighweight desktop.
The toplevel for these items is here:
http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/...nload/DeskTop/
There are also several _hundred_ lightweight apps for most anything you could think of. Most of the GTK-1.2 stuff is under here:
http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/.../Applications/
But, go up one level and have a look around -I'm pretty sure you'll find something useful there if you look enough. Sources and binary packages are there for everything, along with src2pkg build scripts and sometimes patches, documents or other material related to each program.

It uses 5 MB, so that's not much.
Of course it's all a matter of taste, but I happen to like IceWM and especially the capability to move apps to the systray and launching apps by pressing Alt+Ctrl+Spacebar (like Alt + F2 on KDE and Xfce).
A screenshot of my Desktop can be found here.

It is very configurable, I've been using quite some time now and I can't get enough of it. There are also some GUI tools to configure it, but I don't need them as I discovered them when I set it all up.

Does it allow you to switch keymodes on the fly? For instance, with fluxbox I have it set up so that I hit CTRL+ALT+m and I go into "move key mode". In this mode the arrow keys move a window a pixel in each direction with SHIFT making them move several pixels in a direction, the number keys move a window to that workspace number, and the 'a' button auto-arranges them (like a tiling wm). ESC exits the mode.
Does IceWM support auto-arranging/tiling windows?
Does IceWM support key chaining (like emacs)?


Are the mini-windows you are talking about the little icons on the desktop you get when your windows are iconified (minimized)? That is one of the main reasons I don't like WindowMaker. A while back when I looked at it I saw that and exited immediately. How do you suppress it and have them in a taskbar instead?

I've checked out your site before and it does have a lot of nice apps on there. Thank you for the links. A couple of suggested additions would be:
CurseTheWeather
herrie
Both are minimal CLI programs and both can support pseudo-transparency.


Overall, fluxbox is nearly the perfect WM for me. I would prefer having a pager with hinting in it, but I can add something like fbpanel or obpager for that. My only real gripe with fluxbox is that it does not have a popup menu when you switch windows and workspaces. Also, the window list (such as the one you get when you middle click on the desktop) has all the windows in sub-menus of the workspaces, and I'd prefer that they were not in submenus.

I've been looking for an application that will fill this functionality in for me, and the closest thing I have found is superswitcher. It does much more than I need and it looks like it uses the Windows key for all its uses. The computer I need this most on doesn't have such a key, so I was thinking about assigning my Fn key to super or whatever mod key it is by modifying Xmodmap. I may just hack the source and cut out what I don't need and change the keys though, too.

The openbox pipe menus are cool as well, so it would be nice if fluxbox supported that.

The computer I need light apps on is my TP 600E (PII 400MHz, 288MB RAM). It can run Xfce fine, but I'm stingy with my resources because I like using a couple of fairly resource intensive programs- Firefox and OpenOffice. I like fluxbox better than Xfce anyways. I don't use or need desktop icons, GUI file managers, and I like all the background and pseudo-transparency stuff in fluxbox. Plus, the grouping/tab features are interesting and they keyboard hooks rock.

I guess EvilWM is TOO minimalist, huh?

For my typical use, yeah. I like having some window decorations like a title bar at least. There are some occasions, however, when I'm fine using something like ratpoison or ion, but this is not typical. They also take even more setup before I have them the way I want. I might be more into using tiling window managers if my screen resolution were bigger than 1024x768. Fluxbox's AutoArrange is enough tiling for me currently, however.

Hey, you don't have to qualify -- I use KDE. (Although I prefer XFCE, IceWM or Fluxbox for a less powerful machine. I once heard of someone who used twm daily. That's just insane. I don't know how they ever got anything done.)