On 31-Mar-2002 dorphell wrote: > Hi, > Firstly, I would like to thank you very much for continuing the development > of what I believe to be the best window manger overall. > > I have been using blackbox since its early versions, and I've persuaded many > friends and co-workers to give it a try. However, something I noticed is that > the people who didn't like it said it lacked a simple taskbar, that's all, a > taskbar. They said they would have dumped their primary window manager for > blackbox if it had a simple taskbar. I have tried fluxbox which has a blunt > taskbar and a taskbar add-on which somone has made, they both weren't very > good. I and numerous others would much prefer a simple > taskbar, a little wider than the current one that can be used just as gnome, > kde, IceWM or most other window managers. It doesn't have to have a "start" > button, maybe just a Blackbox logo, it doesn't need the extra icons/buttons. > This doesn't seem too hard to add and I guarantee you that it will enlarge > the blackbox community. >
This comes up periodically. As you can see, people have opinions on this (-: As a developer, I try to write as little code as possible. Less code, less bugs. Implementing a proper task bar (ours is currently called 'toolbar') is not simple. You have to handle drawing the icons, dealing with hope many open processes and how to draw them, etc. Other groups have written really nice ones, including GNOME and KDE. But even these taskbars are not part of the window manager, they are part of the desktop environment. As Marc points out, the only window manager with any popularity which has one built in is ICEwm. The devel group of blackbox is working on implementing the intercommunication specification that will allow GNOME and/or KDE apps to integrate with blackbox. Then you can run these programs just as if you were running their own window managers. I also suspect the toolbar will become a real runtime on/off option and not just hide/nohide. That way you do not have two bars running. There is a patch, which i have not investigated on the sf.net Tracker which adds a button to bring up the blackbox menu from the toolbar. The person who submitted it runs blackbox on Mac OS X and is unable to open the menu otherwise. There is a possibility this will be a runtime option in the future to allow for that type of use, so you may get part of your wish. Final thoughts. blackbox since the beginning has been about minimal screen presence. This is why minimized windows end up on a menu and not on your screen. This is also why the toolbar does just enough. It has a clock so you do not need to run a separate application. It lists the workspace name so you do not get lost. Adding any kind of support for icons, tasks lists, etc. goes against this simplicity of design. I am happy fluxbox implements this because it means I can send users who insist they need it to that group. fluxbox is great for that -- all the features we developers do not intend to implement usually end up over there. If (not) implementing something in blackbox means a user (or even lots of them) become uninterested and leaves, well that is life. There are so many window managers because each one fills its own niche. People should find one that fits them. This is not to say that I am anti-user input. Some behaviours and features make it into blackbox because of user requests and input. But when an idea runs counter to the spirit of this window manager, I have to say no.
