Openbox xrandr Pipemenu

pubdate:2009-12-15

Openbox is damn-near perfect. I was recently musing on what I would most miss if I switched back to OS X [1] and the answer is Openbox. I’ve grown very fond of “incredibly lightweight” and “highly configurable” as traits of a user interface. My only feature request is some kind of compositing support; I like the OS X/Compiz ability to quickly zoom-in/out, for example.

[1]	I’m not the least bit interested in doing so, mind you.

x.org is kicking ass nowadays (I can only speculate on whether they’re taking names). Anyone who is still bad-mouthing X about on-the-fly multi-monitor support, adding/removing displays, and changing resolutions either isn’t paying attention or is running the god-awful Nvidia binary drivers [2]. The RANDR extension and the xrandr command-line utility are spectcaular.

[2]	It may have been great in the pre-RANDR days but Nvidia hasn’t kept pace with xorg enhancements and can now suck a nut.

I created a pipemenu for Openbox that captures the output of xrandr and puts it into nice menus. It’s called ob-randr and it’s on Google Code. You can also make a configuration file with commonly-used configurations and the pipemenu will pull those in for quick-access. For example, here are two that I commonly use:

• On my netbook’s 800x480 screen I frequently toggle between “zooming out” to a 1280x720 display to get a quick (albeit tiny) overview, and “zooming in” to a pan–able 1280x720 display.
• On my work laptop I freqently toggle between a secondary display rotated 90° to the left, positioned to the right of my laptop LCD, and the regular single-screen configuration.