Fluxbox toolbar and menu

So now that we have apps to run, lets work on the usability of the system. First two things that seen really unhelpful to me are the defaults for the fluxbox toolbar and menus.

Toolbar
I'm going to put my toolbar top center of my screen with a total width of 80%. This means even with windows "full screen" I'll have 10% of my screen width both at the top left and right where I can bring up my fluxbox menu without minimizing every window first. If you've been playing with apps running with maximized windows you'll know what I'm talking about. You can setup the toolbar like so:

1. Right click the desktop for fluxbox menu, click Configuration, click Toolbar, click Placement, then choose Top Center.
2. Right click the desktop for fluxbox menu, click Configuration, click Toolbar, HOVER over Toolbar width percent

• If you want to reduce the % of the screen, LEFT click

• If you want to increase then RIGHT click

Cool huh? Since we know everything in fluxbox is driven by configuration files, we could have easily made these changed by browsing into the ~/.fluxbox directory and modifying the correct file. In this case you'll find these settings in the "init" file, we'll be modifying it for some other reasons sometime soon.

Menu
I hate the default menu that fluxbox offers me, I want everything at most two levels deep so I can launch my app with quickness.

Let's look at ~/.fluxbox/menu and see what the default menu config looks like:
[begin] (fluxbox)
[include] (/etc/X11/fluxbox/fluxbox-menu)
[end]
Seems pretty straight forward, it's just calling back to some system generated menu in /etc to paint our menu. So EVERYTHING in our menu right now is coming directly out of fluxbox.

OK, then let's mess with it! First thing I'm going to paste my own menu items between the begin and include lines, making it look like so:
[begin] (fluxbox)
[submenu] (Accessories) {}
[exec] (Aterm) {aterm -geometry 70x35} <>
[exec] (Galculator) {/usr/bin/galculator} <>
[exec] (Geany) {/usr/bin/geany} <>
[exec] (PCmanFM) {/usr/bin/pcmanfm} <>
[end]
[submenu] (Internet) {}
[exec] (Gftp) {/usr/bin/gftp-gtk} <>
[exec] (Opera) {opera} <>
[exec] (Pidgin) {/usr/bin/pidgin} <>
[exec] (Putty) {/usr/bin/putty} <>
[exec] (TS Client) {/usr/bin/tsclient -f} <>
[end]
[submenu] (Office) {}
[exec] (Abiword) {/usr/bin/abiword} <>
[exec] (Gnumeric) {/usr/bin/gnumeric} <>
[exec] (Xpdf) {/usr/bin/xpdf} <>
[end]
[submenu] (System) {}
[exec] (Root Xterm) {/usr/bin/su-to-root -X -c xterm} <>
[end]
[exit] (Exit)
[include] (/etc/X11/fluxbox/fluxbox-menu)
[end]
So now I have all my menu items above the fluxbox generated ones. Very cool, everything is two layers deep and where I want them (mostly) but I still have that ugly crap menu below everything else.

Instead of removing the "include" line, let's just remark it out incase we want to quickly turn it back on later for some reason. New menu looks like this:
[begin] (fluxbox)
[submenu] (Accessories) {}
[exec] (Aterm) {aterm -geometry 70x35} <>
[exec] (Galculator) {/usr/bin/galculator} <>
[exec] (Geany) {/usr/bin/geany} <>
[exec] (PCmanFM) {/usr/bin/pcmanfm} <>
[end]
[submenu] (Internet) {}
[exec] (Gftp) {/usr/bin/gftp-gtk} <>
[exec] (Opera) {opera} <>
[exec] (Pidgin) {/usr/bin/pidgin} <>
[exec] (Putty) {/usr/bin/putty} <>
[exec] (TS Client) {/usr/bin/tsclient -f} <>
[end]
[submenu] (Office) {}
[exec] (Abiword) {/usr/bin/abiword} <>
[exec] (Gnumeric) {/usr/bin/gnumeric} <>
[exec] (Xpdf) {/usr/bin/xpdf} <>
[end]
[submenu] (System) {}
[exec] (Root Xterm) {/usr/bin/su-to-root -X -c xterm} <>
[end]
[exit] (Exit)
# [include] (/etc/X11/fluxbox/fluxbox-menu)
[end]
That takes care of the ugly menus, and we can just stop here. If we add any apps we can add them to our menu, if it gives us any trouble we can always launch them from a terminal, and absolute worst case we can enable the fluxbox menu anytime we want by removing that # from our config.

Now getting all sorts of practical, I only have about a dozen apps I've installed that I'll be using, maybe I don't need two layers of menus, here is an option:
[begin] (fluxbox)
[exec] (Abiword) {/usr/bin/abiword} <>
[exec] (Aterm) {aterm -geometry 70x35} <>
[exec] (Galculator) {/usr/bin/galculator} <>
[exec] (Geany) {/usr/bin/geany} <>
[exec] (Gftp) {/usr/bin/gftp-gtk} <>
[exec] (Gnumeric) {/usr/bin/gnumeric} <>
[exec] (Opera) {opera} <>
[exec] (PCmanFM) {/usr/bin/pcmanfm} <>
[exec] (Pidgin) {/usr/bin/pidgin} <>
[exec] (Putty) {/usr/bin/putty} <>
[exec] (TS Client) {/usr/bin/tsclient -f} <>
[exec] (Xpdf) {/usr/bin/xpdf} <>
[exec] (Xterm) {/usr/bin/su-to-root -X -c xterm} <>
[exit] (Exit)
# [include] (/etc/X11/fluxbox/fluxbox-menu)
[end]
So this is the menu I'm going to run with, I'll leave a few items in there unexplained so you can go find out what some of those elements are for on your own.

One last scenario, what if someone doesn't know what all those crazy linux apps name mean? How would you know geany was a text editor? You could make this menu really friendly for non-linux users:
[begin] (fluxbox)
[exec] (Calculator) {/usr/bin/galculator} <>
[exec] (Chat Client) {/usr/bin/pidgin} <>
[exec] (Linux Console) {aterm -geometry 70x35} <>
[exec] (File Manager) {/usr/bin/pcmanfm} <>
[exec] (FTP Client) {/usr/bin/gftp-gtk} <>
[exec] (PDF Viewer) {/usr/bin/xpdf} <>
[exec] (Remote Desktop) {/usr/bin/tsclient -f} <>
[exec] (Root Terminal) {/usr/bin/su-to-root -X -c xterm} <>
[exec] (Spreadsheet) {/usr/bin/gnumeric} <>
[exec] (SSH Client) {/usr/bin/putty} <>
[exec] (Text Editor) {/usr/bin/geany} <>
[exec] (Web Browser) {opera} <>
[exec] (Word Processor) {/usr/bin/abiword} <>
[exit] (Exit)
# [include] (/etc/X11/fluxbox/fluxbox-menu)
[end]
I'm not going this route, but you can if you like. This is the greatest strength of linux, you can have it exactly your way!

Let's add one more line to whatever menu we decide on:

 [exec] (Screenshot) {import -pause 3 -window root ~/screenshot.jpeg} <>

*** I had to update to remove a space between the hyphen and w on window. Copy/paste failed me.

This will use part of imagemagick to wait 3 seconds then take a screenshot of the entire desktop and save it as "screenshot.jpeg" in our home directory. Remember to go rename it or save it off somewhere else before trying to snap more. By waiting 3 seconds it will let you pull up your fluxbox menu or put your mouse over something before it snaps.

I think that's enough about the toolbar and the menu for today. I'll circle back on my promise for doing the aterm configuration later, this post is already long enough!