1 ChangeLog for Blackbox 0.50.x
4 Changes from 0.50.4. to 0.50.5:
5 - modified and merged some patches from several contributors. added their
7 - major documentation updates
8 - added a few more platform success reports. changed development platform
10 - added new texture option: Interlaced... it is an extension to the gradient
11 texture that looks really neat... it is compiled in by default but may
12 be removed with --disable-interlace
13 - let's see... where do i begin... the code for 0.51.x has been GREATLY
14 enhanced over 0.50.4 (and the stupid little compile error for KDE has been
15 fixed ;)) Blackbox has undergone major renovation... and i can proudly
16 say that this release is rock solid. Also, i reinstated ccmalloc's tour
17 of duty, and spent several days with it stomping memory leaks in blackbox.
18 i can proudly say that there are no major memory leaks present in 0.51.x
19 - the toolbar has changed it appearance a little bit... the menu button has
20 been removed and the labels and buttons are now symmetrically placed on the
21 toolbar... oh no!? how do you get to your icons/workspaces now? the
22 middle click patch from Greg Barlow has been modified, enhanced and merged
23 with 0.51.x... the workspace menu now behaves just like the root menu...
24 and it can be pinned to the root window (just move it)
25 - the image code has once again been worked over... this time a local LUG
26 friend and i have hashed it out many times and into the wee hours of the
27 morning... this stuff is FAST now... before i added interlacing... we
28 had doubled the speed of the dgradient function... yes... *doubled*
29 - the code to generate error tables, color tables and other tables that are
30 used in image dithering has been rewritten, which severs the last tie to
31 window maker's wrlib that blackbox had. i now understand why and how all
32 the code that i "borrowed" works... and it's been improved... because of
33 this change... dithering is a lot cleaner... and dithering on 8bpp displays
34 is less grainy and less obtrusive...
35 - the linked list code has also been rewritten... blackbox has been using
36 a doubly linked list, and not taking advantage of all the list's
37 capabilities (because it doesnt need them)... so the linked lists are now
38 single-link and much quicker at inserting, removing, searching...
39 - once again... the menu parsing code has been rewritten... this code is
40 very efficient and very extensible... so extensible infact that after
41 implementing the current menu syntax... i added a new tag! you can now
42 insert the workspaces list into your root menu with this:
44 [workspaces] (descriptive label)
46 - the slit menu is now spacially correct... if you want the slit in the top
47 right corner of the root menu... click the top right corner of the slit
48 menu... i think this is a little more user friendly
49 - window gravity should be better supported now... restarts and what not
50 shouldn't produce all those one pixel shifts or moves anymore...
51 - the modifiers for the keygrabs in blackbox are now configurable...
52 the "keys" are still hard wired (left/right for workspace changing, tab
53 for window cycling)... but you may now configure which modifiers to use
54 with the key combos... this introduces two new resources into your
57 session.workspaceChangeModifier
61 session.windowCycleModifier
63 these resources may be set to any combination of the following:
65 Control Mod1 Mod2 Mod3 Mod4 Mod5 Lock Shift
67 also... for convenience... "Alt" is parsed as "Mod1"...
68 session.workspaceChangeModifier defaults to "Control" and
69 session.windowCycleModifier defaults to "Mod1"
70 - smart placement has been made smarter thanks to Dyon Balding's smarter
71 placement patch... this patch has been modified from the original slightly
72 (mostly speed concerns)
73 - signal handling has been made more robust... this allows it to compile on
74 more platforms and now prefers to use sigaction() over signal()
75 - over all... many code clean ups were made and old commented code was
76 purged... this is a very clean very stable release... enjoy people :)
79 Changes from 0.50.3 to 0.50.4:
80 - changed some Copyright information to include the current year
81 - added a number of platforms to the Supported Platforms section of the
83 - added the Slit... the Slit is a window maker dockapp util that lets users
84 use all of applications with Blackbox, and allows users to easily switch
85 between Window Maker and Blackbox more easily... it is included by default,
86 but you can remove it from the source with --disable-slit on your configure
88 - large Brueghel styles and images removed from the base distribution
89 - merged a patch from Benjamin Stewart for very robust menu parsing... this
90 patch allows for parenthesis in menu files, and works well for
91 automatically generating menus from shellscripts and programs... the menu
92 syntax has not changed... it just is understood better :)
93 - added shell style tilde-slash (~/) home directory expansion for the
94 [include] and [style] tags in menu files
95 - added some sanity to window position/gravity code to for GTK applications
96 - added Window Maker style Mod1+MouseButton1+Motion window moving (for those
97 few braindead apps that like to be positioned where no decorations are
99 - added a SIGCHLD handler to clean up processes started by a startup script
100 that then exec's blackbox (gets rid of all those zombie processes)
101 - added a new resource to .blackboxrc which tells Blackbox where to put the
102 Slit... editing your .blackboxrc to change this is discouraged and
103 discarded, as the Slit has a menu that lets you select where to put it
104 (click any mouse button on the slit and see for yourself)
105 - fixed a bug in the workspace renaming feature that ate all Shift keypresses
108 Changes from 0.50.2 to 0.50.3:
109 - few documentation updates
110 - fixes to let -lgen actually get linked with the executable (fixes compile
111 errors on some platforms, most notably, IRIX 6.5)
112 - a new series of styles has been added to the distribution (this accounts
113 for the increased size)
114 - fix to let 16 color servers run blackbox (colormap reduction)
115 - various bug fixes... numerous strncpy's changed to sprintfs...
116 - default font set internally to "fixed" (to let it run on servers that don't
117 have any fonts installed)
118 - fixed bug to let blackbox remove all but the last workspace (instead of the
120 - window gravity offset changes
121 - the default key grabs have changed... there are now 4: alt-tab,
122 shift-alt-tab, ctrl-alt-right, ctrl-alt-left... these keys perform
124 - fixed wire move bug for transient windows
125 - passified error handing for the main window class
126 - fixed gravity restore for restart/exit purposes
129 Changes from 0.50.1 to 0.50.2:
130 - minimal KDE integration (configure/compile time option, turned off by
131 default). This is unfinished and i can't really say if i ever will finish
132 it, but there is enough there to integrate the panel and other modules
134 - changed the regexp in building menus to use a comma (,) as the separator,
136 - various bug fixen (like the one where the window list would stay put after
137 the workspace menu went away)
138 - some hacks to improve speed in the LinkedList routines
139 - new stacking method (to better integrate with the KDE support)... windows
140 are no longer in different "levels", raising windows brings them ALL the
141 way to the front (so it's possible to obscure override redirect windows
142 like image splashes etc.) and lowering throws them ALL the way to the
143 back (even under kfm's icons)... however, the rootmenu and the toolbar
144 (if configured to be ontop) will be placed above raised windows
145 - sticky windows have changed due to the new stack implementation, they can
146 be anywhere in the stack (and not always ontop or onbottom)
147 - session.screenNUM.toolbarRaised resource has changed to
148 session.screenNum.toolbarOnTop
149 - the workspace label in the toolbar is sized a little more sanely now
150 (i found that it looks the best when the workspace label width == clock
152 - colormap focus now has it's own resource, session.colormapFocusModel, which
153 is set to "Click" by default, which means you have to click a window's
154 decorations or the root window to (un)install a colormap... setting this
155 resource to "FollowsMouse" will work just as it says... the window under
156 the pointer will have it's colormap installed
159 Changes from 0.50.0 to 0.50.1:
160 - eliminated the need for XConvertCase... workspace editing should now print
161 any and all characters correctly
162 - added check for libgen.h (which provides the prototype for basename() on
163 some systems, like OpenBSD)
164 - some code obfuscation (i've been removing comments, as some of them don't
165 relate to some of the code below them... i plan on recommenting the code
167 - clicking button 3 will hide ANY menu now, and in the case of the workspace
168 and or client menus, any other menus and/or buttons associated will be
170 - added a patch for multi-screen which sets the DISPLAY env variable so that
171 items selected from one screen don't show up on another... many thanks to
172 F Harvell <fharvell@fts.net> for this
173 - fixed a clock bug... again thanks to F Harvell for this one
174 - complete and proper window placement and window restore has been
175 implemented... windows that are partially off screen will be placed in the
176 center of the root window
177 - the toolbar's workspace label is now dynamically sized according to the
178 length of the workspace names
179 - as stated above... workspace name editing has been completely redone, i
180 discovered XLookupString() this weekend and have deemed it the function of
181 the week... any and all characters should be printed properly now
182 - window placement now has it's own resource...
183 session.screen<NUM>.windowPlacement which may be set to SmartPlacement
184 (which has been implemented) or anything else to default back to cascade
186 - a new resource, session.screen<NUM>.toolbarWidthPercent has been added, and
187 should be set to an integer representing what percentage of the root window
188 width the toolbar should occupy (default has been changed back to 67)
191 Changes from 0.40.14 to 0.50.0:
192 - added util/ subdirectory to place small, utility programs to use in
193 conjunction with blackbox.
194 - updated the README... it's still vague and useless, but gives a better
195 view of whats going on
196 - the configure script now checks for a few more headers, setlocale and
197 strftime in addition to basename functions to better include support for
198 multiple arch/langs/etc.
199 - updated default menu file... made it a little more general... and made
200 the default style menu [include]'d instead of explicitly included...
201 this break off of the style menu allows for custom menus to include the
202 default style menu for a create selection of styles
203 - changed all the default styles to use bsetroot instead of xsetroot
204 - menu handling has been improved... no more than one menu at a time may be
205 visible on the desktop (save for the root menu and it's tear off menus)
206 this means that you can't have multiple window menus and the workspace menu
207 open all at once... which saves screen space and reduces clutter
208 - much of the code has been reorganzied and reformatted for better
209 readability... this consists of function name changes and function
210 "ownership" (which basically means workspaces aren't managed by the toolbar
211 itself anymore, but by a general screen class on which the toolbar can
213 - the workspacemenu now autohides when selecting a window from one of the
215 - removed many empty destructors for Basemenu subclasses to improve code
217 - two new files, Screen.cc and Screen.hh, have been added to the distribution
218 they add the new class BScreen which was needed for the biggest change of
219 the Blackbox code base, the addition of multiple screen (i.e. multihead)
220 support. A separate BScreen is created for each screen, and all screens
221 work inconjunction with the other... windows can't be passed between
222 screens, because the X server doesn't allow this (more investigation on
224 - the toolbar's clock format is now controlled by the strftime() function...
225 if configure can't find this function on your system, the old date/time
226 format is used... with strftime, clicking on the clock doesn't display the
227 date... as the date may now be part of the clock display... read the man
228 page for the strftime function to write a format string for your clock,
229 and place it in .blackboxrc (i.e.
230 session.strftimeFormat: %I:%M %p on %a, %b %d is my strftime format
232 - the toolbar has been stripped of it's workspace responsibilities, but this
233 change has no effect on the end user.
234 - common code interspersed through out the code has been consolodated into
235 small functions and called multiple times instead of having the same or
236 similar code repeated in the same class
237 - the window startup code has been improved upon again so that shaded windows
238 are restored between restarts
239 - some ICCCM code has been updated to properly reflect the state of windows
240 while shaded or on different workspaces... this state code change should
241 also fix the JX toolkit problem of deiconifying and nothing being redrawn
242 - the main Blackbox class has been changed to purely handle X events... it
243 doesn't manage resources (save for those necessary for proper event
244 handling, like the focus model for each screen)
245 - the format of .blackboxrc has changed slightly, the session.menuFile,
246 session.doubleClickInterval, session.imageDither, session.styleFile,
247 and session.colorsPerChannel resources are unchanged. However, the
248 following resources are screen dependant:
250 session.screen<num>.strftimeFormat
251 session.screen<num>.workspaces
252 session.screen<num>.workspaceNames
253 session.screen<num>.toolbarRaised
254 session.screen<num>.focusModel
256 where <num> is the screen number (zero being default and all that would be
257 present on a single screen/monitor setup).
258 - a utility named bsetroot (mentioned above) has been included in the
259 blackbox distribution, to aid in setting root window patterns (ala
260 xsetroot). the only different between xsetroot and bsetroot is that
261 bsetroot doesn't redefine cursors, and doesn't restore defaults if no
262 arguments are given. bsetroot does support multiple screens, and is ideal
263 for those setups (instead of running xsetroot for each screen)