Switching from Openbox to IceWM

Bye-bye Openbox, welcome IceWM.

Due to the recent upgrade of glib2 on Arch Linux, it crashes my Openbox when I am running Wine or Proton. Downgrade to 2.74.6 is not a solution, because Nemo, Caja, Nautilus are using 2.76.0.

As a result, I have to find an alternative. From Wikipedia, I found that LXDE can be configured with other window manager rather than Openbox, eg Fluxbox, IceWM, or Xfwm.

I tried Xfwm, but it fails to run. Probably needs extra configuration, but I didn’t continue trying. I tried Fluxbox long time ago, can’t remember the feature. Then I found that, compare to Openbox, IceWM is still in development. Hence I decided to try IceWM.

After installation, I just need to configure it so that it resembles Openbox behaviour, especially the shortcut keys.

The following is the list of prominent configuration I did:

  • Install dex to start XDG autostart applications

  • Use shutdown script to pkill -u myusername , so that all the processes will be stopped/killed when I logout

  • Hide the taskbar (ShowTaskBar=0), because I use tint2

  • Use prefoverride to replace the default background image. Though, I am still using feh script to show random wallpapers

  • Window related shortcut keys are edited in preferences file; launching application shortcut keys are edited in keys file

For shortcut key to toggle a window as always on top, it requires editing keys file with the following line,

key "Alt+F12" sh -c 'if icesh -f getLayer | grep -q 'OnTop' ; then icesh -f setLayer Normal ; else icesh -f setLayer OnTop ; fi'

Note: Make sure the key such as “Alt+F12” has no conflict in preferences file. If it exists, just empty the value in the preferences file.

Some limitations I faced:

  • I cannot use Numix theme anymore

  • Alt+Ctrl+Del (system dialog) has a strange behaviour if I cancel it. I can’t type on any window after cancel, unless I switch the workspace.

As a conclusion, I just need to adapt to this new window manager. Bye-bye Openbox.