jgmenu as default menu generator for Lithium?

PackRat · 2019-06-02 20:57:57

DeepDayze wrote:

Naik wrote:
I must say that i like what you did here but can not really enjoy tjhe idea of bringing in any other application to handle this. for my taste the OB-menu and it' s GUI-generator are usable enough and it is anything but difficult to bring the debian/xdg menu up if needed.
I just don't see why this is neccesary. Is it likely that openbox will die within the next months/years?
naik --greetz
I believe OB will be ported to Wayland so we can still have OB goodness even then.

I just read about a project that is a fork of openbox for wayland. Can't remember the name of it though.

DeepDayze · 2019-06-02 21:40:50

PackRat wrote:

DeepDayze wrote:
Naik wrote:
I must say that i like what you did here but can not really enjoy tjhe idea of bringing in any other application to handle this. for my taste the OB-menu and it' s GUI-generator are usable enough and it is anything but difficult to bring the debian/xdg menu up if needed.
I just don't see why this is neccesary. Is it likely that openbox will die within the next months/years?
naik --greetz
I believe OB will be ported to Wayland so we can still have OB goodness even then.
I just read about a project that is a fork of openbox for wayland. Can't remember the name of it though.

Yes name escapes me too but that sounds like an interesting project. Would love to see Fluxbox and FVWM ported too.

PackRat · 2019-06-02 22:36:04

DeepDayze wrote:

PackRat wrote:
DeepDayze wrote:
I believe OB will be ported to Wayland so we can still have OB goodness even then.
I just read about a project that is a fork of openbox for wayland. Can't remember the name of it though.
Yes name escapes me too but that sounds like an interesting project. Would love to see Fluxbox and FVWM ported too.

Last I checked (year or so ago), Thomas Adam said Fvwm will get ported to Wayland if it goes mainstream. Kind of a cross that bridge when we get to it attitude.

Wayland? -- maybe, but it's new and a moving target. No decorations (a la Xlib).

Last edited by PackRat (2019-06-03 01:56:43)

DeepDayze · 2019-06-03 00:51:56

PackRat wrote:

DeepDayze wrote:
PackRat wrote:
I just read about a project that is a fork of openbox for wayland. Can't remember the name of it though.
Yes name escapes me too but that sounds like an interesting project. Would love to see Fluxbox and FVWM ported too.
Last I checked (year or so ago), Thomas Adam said Fvwm will get ported to Wayland if it goes mainstream. Kind of a cross that bridge when we get to it attitude.

Sounds good and it be great to have some lightweight WM's running atop Wayland besides the heavyweights GNOME and KDE.

Last edited by DeepDayze (2019-06-03 00:52:17)

johnraff · 2019-06-03 04:35:03

...and this is why we're trying to break the bonds with Openbox right now, to make things easier in the future.
Things like the menu, we can do right away. And jgmenu does have some nice improvements over the built-in openbox menu.

ohnonot · 2019-06-03 06:50:50

Naik wrote:

I must say that i like what you did here but can not really enjoy tjhe idea of bringing in any other application to handle this. for my taste the OB-menu and it' s GUI-generator are usable enough and it is anything but difficult to bring the debian/xdg menu up if needed.

who are you replying to?
malm, and jgmenu in general, or some specific aspect of this thread?

If jgmenu in general:
I believe jgmenu does things differently than the default openbox menu, has more options (even compared to a dynamic menu generator for OB) while still being very light and obviously can be used independently of openbox.
Except pipemenus, I believe that is a unique and useful feature of openbox' menu.
That said, I have no need for jgmenu myself and mostly just use trizen's obmenu-generator.

Naik wrote:

I just don't see why this is neccesary. Is it likely that openbox will die within the next months/years?

The real question here is: Is wayland going to push Xorg out, and if so, when.
First of all, make that years.
Personally I do not see Xorg going away anytime in the coming years; but there's the thing that the next debian release will feature GNOME/Wayland as a default...

DeepDayze wrote:

I believe OB will be ported to Wayland so we can still have OB goodness even then.

I know nothing of this.
Please share that important information if you have it.

johnraff · 2019-06-03 07:21:23

ohnonot wrote:

...pipemenus, I believe that is a unique and useful feature of openbox' menu.

jgmenu does pipemenus too. Ask @malm for details, but I can confirm that openbox pipemenu scripts can be used as-is by jgmenu.

Last edited by johnraff (2019-06-03 07:21:52)

PackRat · 2019-06-03 10:05:52

ohnonot wrote:

DeepDayze wrote:
I believe OB will be ported to Wayland so we can still have OB goodness even then.
I know nothing of this.
Please share that important information if you have it.

https://github.com/wizbright/waybox

There are some forks/clones in the works. I don't think the openbox devs are actually going to port openbox to Wayland. Fluxbox devs weren't too interested in porting to Wayland either.

Naik · 2019-06-03 13:09:52

ohnonot wrote:

Naik wrote:
I must say that i like what you did here but can not really enjoy tjhe idea of bringing in any other application to handle this. for my taste the OB-menu and it' s GUI-generator are usable enough and it is anything but difficult to bring the debian/xdg menu up if needed.
who are you replying to?
malm, and jgmenu in general, or some specific aspect of this thread?
If jgmenu in general:
I believe jgmenu does things differently than the default openbox menu, has more options (even compared to a dynamic menu generator for OB) while still being very light and obviously can be used independently of openbox.
Except pipemenus, I believe that is a unique and useful feature of openbox' menu.
That said, I have no need for jgmenu myself and mostly just use trizen's obmenu-generator.

That's it, the process of adapting it and the results shown here.
Sometimes I am a bit slow with adapting new things and have grown accustomed to the menu and the way it works. When something is about to change now, I don't know if it is to my likings. But as it looks for now the first glance experience will be quite the same and even the way things are configured won' t change that much, am i right?

ohnonot wrote:

Naik wrote:
I just don't see why this is neccesary. Is it likely that openbox will die within the next months/years?
The real question here is: Is wayland going to push Xorg out, and if so, when.
First of all, make that years.
Personally I do not see Xorg going away anytime in the coming years; but there's the thing that the next debian release will feature GNOME/Wayland as a default...

I see that Xorg seems to have become a strange big Monster with layers of layers on top of old layers of improvment and maybe it is a good thing to give wayland a chance. I was just curious whether all of this is meant to lead into dropping openbox altogether on bunsenlabs because openbox is the main reason why i came and stayed here (ever since crunchbang times).

naik --greetz

malm · 2019-06-03 20:11:03

@naik, I have used openbox for a long time too, and struggle to really like anything else.

I have messed around with a few libraries/code-bases in the hope of finding one which could provide the beginnings of an openbox replacement. Quick notes on my findings so far (only my personal views based on pretty limited research - so take it for what it is):

kwin and mutter - too big
QtWayland - Possibly a bit too Qt/C++ for us (me anyway). Missing xwayland support. Supports nvidia through EGLStreams (which those further down the list don't). I played around with grefsen but struggled with scaling, cursors and various Qt quirks. You'd probably want the latest version of QtWayland, so a bit tiring on Debian. Possibly more suited to IOT, in car entertainment, etc.
Mir - Looks promising. Lubuntu have declared that they will be switching to Wayland by default for 20.10 and that they are going to do this by porting Openbox to use the Mir display server. I had a good play with egmde and quite liked it, although it's C++ and is possibly a little bit on the heavy side. Might be a good option if we were to use Ubuntu instead of Debian (although I'm not advocating this). Suggest we let the Lubuntu team get on with it and watch this space...
wlroots - I like the style of this the most and it looks the most promising to me. See swaywm, cage and wio. I don't think that waybox has really got off the ground.

I've had a quick play with wlroots, and will try to push it a bit further after Lithium release - maybe in the autumn. I'll post something if it ever gets to "proof of concept"

malm · 2019-06-03 20:25:24

@naik - I'm trying to stay out of the jgmenu discussions relating adoption or not. It's got to feel right to the devs and the community - I am completely happy either way. I'm happy to answer any technical questions though - of course.

johnraff · 2019-06-04 07:32:23

Naik wrote:

When something is about to change now, I don't know if it is to my likings. But as it looks for now the first glance experience will be quite the same and even the way things are configured won' t change that much, am i right?

Right. I prefer things not to change too much myself (usually hate major Firefox upgrades) and we (the dev team) are trying hard to keep the user experience pretty much the same using jgmenu as it is with the Openbox menu (except for some extra features).

The menu file syntax will change (check with @malm) though the CSV format is simpler, if anything, than the current openbox XML.

Naik · 2019-06-04 09:15:15

johnraff wrote:

Right. I prefer things not to change too much myself (usually hate major Firefox upgrades) and we (the dev team) are trying hard to keep the user experience pretty much the same using jgmenu as it is with the Openbox menu (except for some extra features).
The menu file syntax will change (check with @malm) though the CSV format is simpler, if anything, than the current openbox XML.

Ok, so I am satisfied and leave the rest to you guys. You did a great job on BL so far and I will just wait and see...
Thanks!

naik --greetz

ohnonot · 2019-06-06 05:17:15

@Naik: thanks for the clarifications; it seems we're on the same page there.

about wayland:

malm wrote:

Lubuntu have declared that they will be switching to Wayland by default for 20.10 and that they are going to do this by porting Openbox to use the Mir display server.

Very interesting!
I hope they do it in a way that it is usable on wayland as well (Mir is still a *buntu thing, no?).

PackRat wrote:

DeepDayze wrote:
I believe OB will be ported to Wayland so we can still have OB goodness even then.
https://github.com/wizbright/waybox

the person who made that bold claim hasn't deigned to respond, so I suppose that's what they're refering to.
The commit history is not too impressive; but of course that could change when matters become more pressing in the future.

I haven't actually tested wayland yet.

I don't think the openbox devs are actually going to port openbox to Wayland.

i'm sure you're right there.
Dana Jansens made this comment on 3 Dec 2017:

I still use it daily and try to fix anything that breaks (like gnome integration a while ago) but haven't had the motive to make changes to it when it's working well enough.

...which doesn't actually mention wayland at all

Last edited by ohnonot (2019-06-06 05:17:52)

dhalgren · 2019-06-15 23:49:21

What is
@search,,1,3,150,20,2,left,top,auto,#000000 0,Search...
And why is it there?
It appears to do nothing but sit at the top of the menu saying "Search..."

Or is there something I need to install for it to do something?
Needless ot say, I have looked for informatin on this, but I seem not to be very good at finding the information I need.

Beyond this oddity, I am quite enjoying using jgmenu, although I have not yet made it default.

PackRat · 2019-06-16 01:11:37

^ Search box widget.

From the Wiki -

Lesson 11 - Search

jgmenu has a search capability. When a menu is open, just start
typing to invoke a filter.

A search box can be inserted using widgets (see github wiki).

dhalgren · 2019-06-16 01:31:27

Thnk you PackRat!

I did lok there, but as I said, I can be quite useless in finding information, and sometimes even read over it. Also saves me having to add too much to the prepend.csv

Now that I know, it works beautifully!

hhh · 2019-06-16 02:32:39

Search-to-find is one of the main reasons we're trying to move away from the (frankly, in my opinion) outdated menu Openbox provides. Having a menu that is window-manager independent is another. All the other features just make the deal sweeter.

@malm, maybe a clearer label than just 'Search'? I'm not sure what, maybe no menu item at all and we instead explain that feature in our Release Notes?

johnraff · 2019-06-16 04:19:33

hhh wrote:

All the other features...

Tucked away in the middle is an "Applications" sub-menu. That is auto-updated so when you install a new package it appears there without needing to edit the menu by hand. Some users might find that an improvement.

malm · 2019-06-16 06:21:41

@dhalgren

Interesting point.

Maybe we should make it look like an obvious search box.

I personally quite liked the unobrusive, in-keeping ‘Search...’

#41 2019-06-02 20:57:57

Re: jgmenu as default menu generator for Lithium?

#42 2019-06-02 21:40:50

Re: jgmenu as default menu generator for Lithium?

#43 2019-06-02 22:36:04

Re: jgmenu as default menu generator for Lithium?

#44 2019-06-03 00:51:56

Re: jgmenu as default menu generator for Lithium?

#45 2019-06-03 04:35:03

Re: jgmenu as default menu generator for Lithium?

#46 2019-06-03 06:50:50

Re: jgmenu as default menu generator for Lithium?

#47 2019-06-03 07:21:23

Re: jgmenu as default menu generator for Lithium?

#48 2019-06-03 10:05:52

Re: jgmenu as default menu generator for Lithium?

#49 2019-06-03 13:09:52

Re: jgmenu as default menu generator for Lithium?

#50 2019-06-03 20:11:03

Re: jgmenu as default menu generator for Lithium?

#51 2019-06-03 20:25:24

Re: jgmenu as default menu generator for Lithium?

#52 2019-06-04 07:32:23

Re: jgmenu as default menu generator for Lithium?

#53 2019-06-04 09:15:15

Re: jgmenu as default menu generator for Lithium?

#54 2019-06-06 05:17:15

Re: jgmenu as default menu generator for Lithium?

#55 2019-06-15 23:49:21

Re: jgmenu as default menu generator for Lithium?

#56 2019-06-16 01:11:37

Re: jgmenu as default menu generator for Lithium?

#57 2019-06-16 01:31:27

Re: jgmenu as default menu generator for Lithium?

#58 2019-06-16 02:32:39

Re: jgmenu as default menu generator for Lithium?

#59 2019-06-16 04:19:33

Re: jgmenu as default menu generator for Lithium?

#60 2019-06-16 06:21:41

Re: jgmenu as default menu generator for Lithium?

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