¬ just serendipity 🍀 (not just serendipity)

Previously.

So, it’s the third day, let’s go.

Setting up my config repo #

First things first: I’ve created a github repo with my config files. I chose not to use my dotfiles repo, because this repo is usually changing. My primary way to add files to it will be using symbolic links. But git doesn’t really follow symbolic links. I had to handle this with some workarounds, which you could read about in this Stack Overflow thread about symlinks and in this one about git and symbolic links. The mount --bind way sounds intelligent, I haven’t thought of this before. But I don’t want to mess with my /etc/fstab with several entries, it would look a bit dirty. So I’ve created a symbolic link from my openbox config dir to my github repo.

If you are reading to try to learn about openbox, I would recommend you to check out my autostart file. I usually use #cst to identify parts of the code that I’ve edited (cst = custom). Today I’ve modified the environment config file, just to add one language to it. I won’t set up a cron job anymore, I’ve noticed this is unnecessary in this case. Actually, this may be a good idea to apply to the dotfiles repo; but not to the openbox one.

Shortcuts and tricks #

A shortcut I discovered today: scroll the mouse while focusing the desktop and you’ll switch around desktops. Another good trick which I’m used to in Fluxbox (and works in openbox also) is to hold the Alt key while right clicking in a window. This will resize the window.

The first shortcut would soon prove very annoying in the 1px left margin space I configured yesterday. I was accidentally switching desktops all the time because of that. So I removed the margin space.

Menu configuration #

Changing subjects: the obmenu tool is amazing (it is in the official Arch repos) to configure the menu. It is a GUI, so I won’t talk about its details, it’s really simple to use it. I’ve created a “Firefox” entry to test, and it works like a charm. But what if I run mmaker again? Yeah, the firefox entry disappears (like you should expect). What if I want to integrate my custom obmenu entries with the mmaker (generation)? I searched a little and found out that this can be easily achieved by editing the menu.xml file by hand. First, create a custom_menu.xml file. Then run mmaker again. Now, add the contents of custom_menu.xml to menu.xml – in the right place! My right place is under the root menu. To update the menu, run openbox --reconfigure. This is not a fully automated manner, but works and it’s simple. Actually it’s pretty easy to write a script to automate this, but I find it unnecessary. Let’s (be) KISS here.

Off-topic reflection #

So, I’ll end here for today. Truth is I spend more time editing these posts than learning openbox itself. This is because I wanna make decent posts, right? I wouldn’t mind this, I really enjoy writing these posts, but I have college homework to do and tests to study to. I’m not sure what I’ll do about this. I don’t want to pass a day without posting (this would break the challenge), but I can’t lose so much time with this either. I want to learn emacs org2blog to optimize my time, but not now. I think the practice is essential! It helps me endorsing more firmly the know-how and the concepts of these activities.

Tomorrow plans #

• Icons in the menu? (Fluxbox easily supports that)
• Read more about menu.xml (I only skimmed it today)
• Etc (can’t think of anything now)

Today interesting pages #

• http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=192106
• http://crunchbanglinux.org/wiki/configuring_the_openbox_menu
• http://obmenu.sourceforge.net/index.html
• http://menumaker.sourceforge.net/
• https://github.com/thiagowfx/openbox

Thank you for reading.