Blackbox Documentation/Blackbox Toolbar

1) What is the toolbar?

The toolbar is a Blackbox-provided tool in the form of a thin horizontal rectangle, which is used to convey a bare minimum of essential information and functionality to the user. Due to its shape, the toolbar can only be placed next to the bottom or top screen edges.

2) Changing toolbar settings

The toolbar has its own context menu which serves to change its settings. Settings can also be changed from the main Blackbox menu (starting with 0.70) or from the Blackbox configuration file.

Some of the toolbar settings are: autohide, always on top, changing its position on the screen, make windows avoid it when they maximize (this is actually a setting common to all windows and affects the slit too). More advanced settings such as the toolbar width can only be set from the config file and require a restart of Blackbox to take effect.

3) What is it good for?

The toolbar was created in order to offer a minimal amount of absolutely essential information to the Blackbox user. This includes the following:

The name of the current workspace being viewed.
The name of the currently focused window.
A configurable clock (actually, a string using date flags which can become a flexible representation of the current date and time).
Arrow buttons so you can change workspace and window focus with the pointer (mouse).

4) What the toolbar is NOT

The toolbar was not meant to offer any information other than the above-mentioned bare minimum. It is meant as a minimal built-in source of desktop information when no other tools are available. It is not meant to become a full-fledged panel stuffed full with gadgets and widgets.

Also, the toolbar is not a taskbar, i.e. it doesn't show the currently open or iconified windows in any way. It only shows the name of the currently focused window. This is partly due to the minimalistic nature of the toolbar, partly due to Blackbox striving to keep a clean desktop and promoting iconified (ie. completely hidden) windows instead of minimized (ie. still visible in some sort of taskbar) windows.

5) I don't like the toolbar

If you don't have any use for the toolbar, starting with version 0.70 it can be disabled completely. See the config submenu in the Blackbox menu.

If you'd like more information in your toolbar, please see BlackboxAddons for suggestions of alternatives. There are a number of third-party tools out there that can most likely do what you want. Panels from popular desktop environments such as Gnome or KDE can also work well with Blackbox versions 0.70 and up.